BYRON ON DREAMS.

27

except by the supposition already glanced at,— that the mind then acts not by its exterior organization, but either apart from all organs, or (which to me seems far more probable) by that highly refined interior organization, to which, during sleep, the torpor of the visible and tangible organs permits a freer agency, somewhat like what may take place when the mortal frame is dissolved.

To the whole mystery of this subject, Lord Byron's well-known lines, with his accustomed elevation and energy of diction, powerfully direct our thoughts.

"Our life is two-fold: sleep hath its own world,

A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality:

And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy :
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts;
They take a weight from off our waking toils :
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity.

They pass like spirits of the past; they speak,
Like Sibyls, of the future; they have power;
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;

They make us what we were not-what they will-
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,

The dread of vanished shadows."

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INVENTIVENESS AND POWER.

SECTION III.

I WOULD now invite attention to the second point proposed, namely, the intellectual inventiveness and power frequently exerted in dreams. That original and eccentric writer, Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici, thus describes his own experience: "I thank God for my happy dreams, as I do for my good rest. We are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps, and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of our souls. It is the ligation of our sense, but the liberty of reason; our awaking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps. At my nativity, my ascendant was the earthly sign of Scorpio, I was born in the planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a piece of that leaden planet in me. I am no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company; yet in one dream I can compose a

SIR T. BROWNE.

COLERIDGE.

29

29

whole comedy, behold the action in one dream, apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceits thereof. Were my memory as faithful as my reason is then fruitful, I would never study but in my dreams, and this time also would I choose for my devotions; but our grosser memories have then so little hold of our abstracted understandings, that they forget the story, and can only relate to our awakened souls a confused and broken tale of that that has passed."

He afterwards writes in reference to what he had said of the elevation of the faculties in sleep, "Thus I observe that men oftentimes upon the hour of their departure do speak and reason above themselves. For then the soul begins to be freed from the ligaments of the body, begins to reason like herself, and to discourse in a strain above mortality." Let it be noticed that all these are the remarks of an acute and practised physician.

The poet Coleridge published a fragment of a poem, composed by him in sleep; or what he terms "a vision in a dream." His prefatory account of the circumstances I thus abridge.

1 Relig. Med. Edit. 1642, pp. 178-181.

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COLERIDGE'S "VISION

"In the summer of 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a farm-house, between Porlock and Linton. In consequence of slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effect of which he fell asleep in his chair, at the moment that he was reading these or similar words in Purchas's Pilgrimage, Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto; and thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall.'-The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition, in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business, and detained above

an hour, and on his return to his room found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away."

Of what the poet had previously written down, I present the chief portion, to the reader's curiosity rather than his criticism; for perhaps, according to Sir Thomas Browne, it should be both recited and heard in sleep, in order to be fully appreciated.

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round :

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

"But oh, that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place, as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!