"Would that mine had been so!" answered the Count. "But they were wild and whirling things, and 'tis no matter--and yet these undigested thoughts," he continued, after a short pause, "these fanciful nothings of the dreaming brain, trouble us as much at the time as fierce realities--nay, perhaps more. I have suffered more bitterly, at times, in some dark vision of the night--yes, even in my corporeal frame,--than even choking death itself could inflict. I cannot but think that there is a land to which the spirits of the sleeping travel for a time, and undergo a strange and wayward fate, till they are called back again. I've often fancied there must be such a place: a kingdom of dreams, as it were, to which all the strange actions and thoughts of the world are sent as soon as done, as a sort of commodity or merchandise, and there are mingled up by some fantastic power with the productions of the land itself. There go the images of the dead, the voices that are lost upon the earth, the passionate loves and follies of our youth, the thirsty ambition of our manhood, the crimes and the temptations of all years, even the very thoughts of infancy, and there we find them all, when the spirit is summoned from the slumbering body to visit that strange country. Else, how is it, that when we lie with darkness all around us, no sight, no sound, no scent, to wake up memory, things long forgotten, faces that no effort of the waking mind could call before the eye of fancy, voices that have long ceased to ring in the deafened ear of forgetfulness, come upon us, all strong and vivid as reality; ay, even the feelings also no longer suited to our state of being, totally dissonant to the condition of our corporeal frame or to our mental age:--such as the joys and pastimes of our early boyhood, and the prattled pleasures of our baby days? Yet there they all are--bright as if in life, though strangely mixed with other wilder things, and cast into mad impossible array. Last night it seemed as if every action of my life, charmed by some frantic Orpheus, danced around me in wild and grotesque forms--never pausing till I had leisure to taste one joy, or power to resist one pang. Would to Heaven! I could be a boy again, and, with the knowledge of each act's results, live over life anew--It would be a very different one!"