“And for my soul, what can it do for that, Being a thing immortal?” HAMLET. CAST. We have risen with the lark to salute you, Astrophel. And you have really slept in Tintern Abbey? Yet not alone; “I see queen Mab hath been with you,” and brushed you with her wing as you lay asleep. ASTR. Throughout the live-long night, sweet Castaly, I have revelled in a world of dreams. My couch and pillow were the green grass turf. No wonder that tales of the times of old should crowd on my memory, that elfin lips should whisper in my ear— CAST. “The soft exquisite music of a dream.” IDA. Talk not of dreams so lightly, dear Castaly; the visions of sleep are among the most divine mysteries of our nature: these transient flights of the spirit in a dream, unfettered as they seem by the will, are, to my own mind, among the most exalted proofs of its immortality. Is it not so, Evelyn? EV. The mystery which you have glanced at, Ida, is the most sublime subject in metaphysics. Yet in our analysis of the phenomena of intellect, it is our duty to discard, with reverential awe, many of the notions of the _pseudo psychologists_ in allusion to that self-evident truth, that requires not the support of such arguments. In tracing the mystery of a dream to its association with our immortal essence, reason will at length be involved in a maze of conjecture. True philosophy will never presume to _explain_ the mystical union of spirit and of flesh; she would be bewildered even in their _definitions_, and would incur some peril of forming unhallowed conclusions. Even the _nature_ of the rational soul will involve him in endless conjecture, whether it be _fire_, as Zeno believed; or _number_, according to Xenocrates; or _harmony_, according to Aristoxenus; or the lucid fire—the Creator of all things, of the Chaldean astrologers. He who aspires to a solution of the mystery, may wear out his brain in the struggle, as Philetas worked himself to death in a vain attempt to solve the celebrated “Pseudomenos,” the paradox of the stoics; or, like the gloomy students of the German school, he might conclude his researches with a question like this rhapsody—unanswerable. “But thou, my spirit, thou that knowest this, that speakest to thyself, what art thou? what wast thou ere this clay coat was cut for thee? and what wilt thou be when this rain-coat, this sleeping-frock, fall off thee like a garment torn to pieces? Whence comest thou? where goest thou? Ah! where from and to, where darkness is before and behind thee? Oh ye unclothed, ye naked spirits, hear this soliloquy—this soul-speech. Know ye that ye be? Know ye that ye were, that ye are as we are or otherwise, in eternity? Do ye work within us, when a holy thrilling darts through us like lightning, where not the skin trembles but the soul within us? Tell us, oh tell us, what then is death?”