If in the dream the chain be abruptly broken, the waking mind does not then carry on the train, and if any thing occur in waking, associating with the dream, to join the broken link, the dream is not completed, but the ideas _revert_, or are retraced, to their source; and if any idea at the origin of the dream be _re-excited_, there will be no consistent continuance of it beyond the dream itself, or, if there be, it will bear the stamp of reasoning, losing all connexion with the illusion. On the contrary, if we read as we are falling asleep, we continue _in the dream_ the subject of our study, but _erroneously_; and if we then start and wake, we shall find that at the moment of slumber we had _changed the integrity_ of our thinking. Be assured, then, that Virgil is correct in this— “She seems alone To wander in her sleep, through ways unknown, _Guideless_ and _dark_.” CAST. And now, Sir Knight, deign to look on the other side of the shield. Answer me with sincerity,—if your words be true, is not this a high privilege of imaginative minds, to lift themselves out of the gloomy atmosphere of this world of woe; to soar with fancy, not to drudge with fact? How do I envy a romantic dreamer, like him of whom Master Edmund Spenser writes,— “——at length, some wonted slepe doth crowne His new falne lids, dreames straight, tenne pound to one, Out steps some faëry with quick motion, And tells him wonders of some flourie vale.” Sleep is indeed the reality of another existence. ASTR. So breathed the thought of Heraclitus, in words like these,—that “all men, whilst they are awake, are in one common world; but that each, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.” The fairies are his boon and chosen compeers, and the sylphs are as much his handmaidens, as those around the toilet of Belinda. We are indeed the happy children, and, like them, our existence is a dream of felicity,—one long and happy thought of the _present_, with no reflection or forethought to mar its blisses. Then the shades and memory of departed friends and lovers, are they not around us as true and as beautiful as when they lived? The common sentiment of enamoured dreamers is— “I hear thy voice in dreams upon me softly call; I see thy form as when thou wert a living thing.” In the dream, ambition is lifted to the loftiest pinnacle of her high aspirings; and power and riches are showered in profusion in the path of their votaries from the cornucopia of fancy; and all this with a depth and intensity that gilds for a time the moments of waking life. And I agree with Saint Augustine, that if we sleep and dream in Paradise, our existence will be perfectly felicitous. But then, alas! the cruel waking from this world of pleasure. I have breathed many a sigh of sympathy with Milton’s dream of his dead wife, and with Crabbe, in his “World of Dreams.”