This reverie may be languid, luxurious, and lapped in down--enveloped in a perfume weighing down the very senses, and obliterating by its drowsy influence every sentiment but languid pleasure; or it may be fiery and heroic, eloquent of war and shocks, sounding of beauteous battle, and red banners bathed in slaughter. But there is something different from both of these moods--the one languid and the other fiery. There is the neutral ground of fancy properly so called: a land which we enter with closed eyes and smiling lips, a country full of fruits and flowers--fruits of that delicious flavor of the Hesperides, sweet flowers odorous as the breezy blossoms which adorn the mountains. Advance into that brilliant country, and you draw in life at every pore--a thousand merry figures come to meet you: maidens clad in the gay costumes of the elder time, all fluttering with ribbons, rosy cheeks and lips!--maidens who smile, and with their taper fingers point at those who follow them; gay shepherds, gallant in silk stockings and embroidered doublets, carrying their crooks wreathed round with flowers; while over all, the sun laughs gladly, and the breezes bear away the merry voices, sprinkling on the air the joyous music born of lightness and gay-heartedness. All the old manners, dead and gone with dear grandmother's youth, are fresh again; and myriads of children trip along on red-heeled shoes, and agitate the large rosettes, and glittering ribbons, and bright wreaths of flowers which deck them out like tender heralds of the spring. And with them mingle all those maidens holding picture-decorated fans with which they flirt--this is the derivation of our modern word--and the gay gallants with their never-ending compliments and smiles. And so the pageant sweeps along with music, joy, and laughter, to the undiscovered land, hidden in mist, and entered by the gateway of oblivion. You see all this in reverie, gentle reader--build your pretty old chateau to dream in, that is; and it swarms with figures--graceful and grotesque as those old high-backed carven chairs--slender and delicate as the chiselled wave which breaks in foam against the cornice. And then you wake, and find the flowers pressed in the old volume called the Past, all dry--your castle only a castle of your dreams. Poor castle made of cards, which a child's finger fillips down, or, like the frost palace on the window pane, faints and fails at a breath! Your reverie is over: nothing bright can last, not even dreams; and so your figures are all gone, your fairy realm obliterated--nothing lives but the recollection of a shadow! The reader is requested to identify our melancholy lover Jacques with the foregoing sentences; and forgive him in consideration of his unfortunate condition. Lovers, as every body knows, live dream-lives; and what we have written is not an inaccurate hint of what passed through the heart of Jacques as he went on beneath peach and cherry blossoms to his love.