So often, indeed, do we hear the pregnant declaration, to wit: “Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men see visions,” that we have adopted it as a striking rhetorical figure of wide application. In Hamlet’s celebrated soliloquy upon the immortality of the soul, the melancholy Dane confesses to an overmastering fear of bad dreams. And once again, as if wrung from the very anguish of his sinful heart, Gloster cries out: “Oh, Catesby, I have had such horrid dreams!” And Catesby expostulates, “Shadows, my lord, below the soldiers seeming.” But Gloster thrusts aside the rebuke as he impetuously exclaims: “Now by my this day’s hopes, shadows to-night have struck more terror to the soul of Richard, than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers arm’d all in proof.” We find that our own immediate ancestors were fully as credulous in regard to the importance of dreams, as affecting their lives and fortunes, as the ancients appear to have been. But with them it is true that Scripture warrant was accepted as all-sufficient. Just a few examples will suffice. In the time of its disintegration, owing to the removal of some of its members to Connecticut, the church of Dorchester, Massachusetts, “did not reorganize on account of certain dreams and visions among the congregation.” Under a certain date, Samuel Sewall sets down the fact that he has had disturbing dreams, which he, according to his wont, anxiously strives to interpret--he, of all men!--a magistrate, a councillor, and a ruler in the land. One dream was to the effect “that all my [his] children were dead except Sarah, which did distress me sorely with reflections on my omissions of duty towards them as well as breaking of the hopes I had of them.” Shifting now the scene to half a century later, we find in the “Diary and Letters of Sarah Pierpont,” wife of the celebrated theologian, Jonathan Edwards, this letter, describing a singularly prophetic dream relative to her grandson, then an infant, Aaron Burr:-- “STOCKBRIDGE, May 10, 1756. “DEAR BROTHER JAMES: Your letters always do us good, and your last was one of your best. Have you heard of the birth of Esther’s second child, at Newark? It was born the sixth of February last, and its parents have named him Aaron Burr, Jr., after his father, the worthy President of the College. I trust the little immortal will grow up to be a good and useful man. But, somehow, a strange presentiment of evil has hung over my mind of late, and I can hardly rid myself of the impression that that child was born to see trouble.