THE WAKING. Ah! che non sol quelle, ch' io canto o scrivo Favole son; ma quanto temo, o spero, Tutto è menzogna, e delirando io vivo Sogno della mia vita è il corso intero. --METASTASIO. It was one of the sweetest sleeps I had ever enjoyed. Fatigue had been bountiful to me, and given me back a blessing I had not known for many a weary night. It is only when we have lost them, for a time, that we learn to appreciate Heaven's gifts. The whole world is full of sweets that we taste not, till sickness teaches us that our very faculties are joys, or confinement makes us esteem the wooing of Heaven's free air, the choicest blessing of existence. God has loaded us with bounties, and yet man, the spoiled child of creation, whimpers for the toys he cannot gain. It was one of the sweetest sleeps I had enjoyed for long, and when I woke and saw the sun shining through a window down to the floor, the massy black rafters of the ceiling, with wood enough to build twenty modern houses, the old-fashioned gilt chairs, and the cabinet with cherubim's heads at all the corners, the tiled floor, and wide vacant chimney, together with the looking-glass and its long frame, half occupied by the portrait of a lack-a-daisical shepherd piping behind a squinting shepherdess, and Cupid looking out from behind a bush, all sorts of recollections of a French seaport came crowding upon me. From the window was a gay scene, with the people of the market jostling, bustling, and chattering, and flirting about, with a thousand lively colours in their garments. And there was the old lumbering diligence before the door, and the pump, and the beggars, and the shoe-blacks; those that will do any thing, and those that will do nothing, and all the hangers-on of a French inn. Wherever I turned, it was France all over; and for a moment I fancied that I had never quitted it, that I had never gone back to England, that I stood there still, where I had stood less than a year before, and that the interval, with all its sorrows, was but a dream, a melancholy dream. I cherished the illusion: I called up every image of those days; I thought of all the gay scenes I had witnessed, and the bright, and the kind, and the happy with whom I had then mingled. I recalled the friends that had entwined themselves with the best feelings of my nature: those who had made me no stranger in a foreign land. I saw the smile with which I had always been welcomed, and the extended hand and the beaming eye. My thoughts were turned from every painful recollection. I dwelt for one moment in the temple of oblivion, and then busy craving memory, that "meddlesome officious ill," came in, and did it all away.