The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 10: The OpinionatorBierce, Ambrose
General
The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 10: The Opinionator
Bierce, Ambrose
American essays; American literature
There are dreams that repeat themselves. Of this class is one of my
own,[1] which seems sufficiently singular to justify its narration,
though truly I fear the reader will think the realms of sleep are
anything but a happy hunting-ground for my night-wandering soul. This
is not true; the greater number of my incursions into dreamland,
and I suppose those of most others, are attended with the happiest
results. My imagination returns to the body like a bee to the hive,
loaded with spoil which, reason assisting, is transmuted to honey
and stored away in the cells of memory to be a joy forever. But the
dream which I am about to relate has a double character; it is
strangely dreadful in the experience, but the horror it inspires is so
ludicrously disproportionate to the one incident producing it, that in
retrospection the fantasy amuses.
I am passing through an open glade in a thinly wooded country. Through
the belt of scattered trees that bound the irregular space there are
glimpses of cultivated fields and the homes of strange intelligences.
It must be near daybreak, for the moon, nearly at full, is low in the
west, showing blood-red through the mists with which the landscape is
fantastically freaked. The grass about my feet is heavy with dew, and
the whole scene is that of a morning in early summer, glimmering in
the unfamiliar light of a setting full moon. Near my path is a horse,
visibly and audibly cropping the herbage. It lifts its head as I am
about to pass, regards me motionless for a moment, then walks toward
me. It is milk-white, mild of mien and amiable in look. I say to
myself: “This horse is a gentle soul,” and pause to caress it. It keeps
its eyes fixed upon my own, approaches and speaks to me in a human
voice, with human words. This does not surprise, but terrifies, and
instantly I return to this our world.
The horse always speaks my own tongue, but I never know what it says. I
suppose I vanish from the land of dreams before it finishes expressing
what it has in mind, leaving it, no doubt, as greatly terrified by my
sudden disappearance as I by its manner of accosting me. I would give
value to know the purport of its communication.
Perhaps some morning I shall understand—and return no more to this our
world.
[1] At my suggestion the late Flora Macdonald Shearer put this drama
into sonnet form in her book of poems, _The Legend of Aulus_.
THE REVIEWER
EDWIN MARKHAM’S POEMS
In Edwin Markham’s book, _The Man With the Hoe and Other Poems_,
many of the “other poems” are excellent, some are great. If asked
to name the most poetic—not, if you please, the “loftiest” or most
“purposeful”—I think I should choose “The Wharf of Dreams.” I venture
to quote it:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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