You remember, Evelyn, how oft you have wondered at my absence from our college cœna. You thought not that I was then deeply studying how I might gain a victory over my thoughts in sleep. As my waking memory would, from some indefinite cause, be re-excited after it had seemed to fade and die, so the subject of my dreams has been resumed after many months, without any chain of relative thoughts in the interval. I believed then that this might be a dream; that I had dreamt the same before; but on the morning of the _second_ dream, reflection assured me that on the morning of the _first_ I had known and thought on it. I was waiting for a golden hour of inspiration, and it was granted me. One night came o’er my slumber a dream of beauty: there was an innocent happiness, a sense of purest pleasure, that might be the beatitude of a peri ere she lost her place in Eden. In the morning, the dream was a part of my being; I nursed it throughout the live-long day, and at night lay me down to slumber, and again with the sleep came the dream. I was thus the monarch of an ideal world: the dream was my life, so long as my thoughts were on it concentrated, and even study was a _Rembrandt_ shadow on its brightness. In a moment of rapture, I cried,— “We forget how superior, to mortals below, Is the fiction they dream to the truth which they know.” I opened the leaf of a volume, in which an accomplished pen had traced an episode so like my own, as to make me wonder at its truth. It was of a visionary German, who, like myself, commanded the phantasie of sleep’s own world, bringing one night thus in connexion with another. He fashioned, like Pygmalion, his idol, Love, and nightly met and wooed, till he won her to his heart, and then he cried,—“What if this glorious sleep be a real life, and this dull waking the true repose?” At length his ideal of beauty, his _dream_, died, stung by a serpent. And then the order of the vision was reversed; the dream lay again before him, dead and withered; he saw his idol only when he was awake, and this was to him a dream. He pined in thought, and died,—sleeping. Was not the sleep of this man his real life, and a scene of happiness? Could _he_ wish for reality who had enjoyed such a dream? For if in life there were equal sleep and waking, and the sleep were all a happy dream, this would indeed be a happy life. May I tell you, Evelyn, that I enjoyed a deep sublimity of feeling, a consciousness of that mental emancipation which devout philosophers have more than glanced at? IDA. Although you have again rather run wild, Astrophel, I agree with you in thinking that, under this influence, the dream may be an illustration of Plato’s notion, regarding the existence of eternal forms, independent of matter,—an emanation of the divine mind imparted to that of human beings; that _innate idea_, if you will, by which the mind views at large— “The uncreated images of things.”