But yester-night I pray'd aloud,
In anguish and in agony,

Up-starting from the fiendish crowd

Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me;
A lurid light, a trampling throng,

Sense of intolerable wrong,

And whom I scorn'd, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will,
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mix'd
On wild or hateful objects fix'd,
Fantastic passions! madd'ning brawl!
And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which all confused I could not know,
Whether I suffer'd, or I did:
For all seem'd guilt, remorse or woe,
My own or others still the same,
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame!

So two nights pass'd: the night's dismay
Sadden'd and stunn'd the coming day.
Sleep, the wide blessing, seem'd to me
Distemper's worst calamity.

The third night, when my own loud scream
Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild,
I wept as I had been a child;

And having thus by tears subdued

My anguish to a milder mood,

Such punishments, I said, were due
To natures deepliest stain'd with sin:
For aye entempesting anew

Th' unfathomable hell within

The horror of their deeds to view,

To know and loathe, yet wish to do!
Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be beloved is all I need,

And whom I love, I love indeed.

This is the dream of a poet, and does not end with the question of a philosopher. We do not pretend to determine why we should have any pains at all. It is enough for us, in our attempt to diminish them, that there are more pleasant than painful ex

citements in the world, and that many pains are the causes of pleasure. But what if these pains are for the same end? What if all this heaping and war of agonies were owing to the author's having taken too little exercise, or eaten a heavier supper than ordinary? But then the proportion! What proportion, it may be asked, is there between the sin of neglected exercise and such infernal visitations as these? We answer,-the proportion, not of the particular offence, but of the general consequences. We have before observed, but it cannot be repeated too often, that Nature, charitable as any poet or philosopher can be upon the subject of merit and demerit, &c., seems to insist, beyond anything else, upon our taking care of the mould in which she has cast us; or in other words, of that ground-work of all comfort, that box which contains the jewel of existence, our health. On turning to the preceding poem in the book, entitled Kubla Khan, we perceive that in his introduction to that pleasanter vision, the author speaks of the present one as the dream of pain and disease. Kubla Khan, which was meditated under the effects of opium, he calls "a psychological curiosity." It is so; but it is also, and still more, a somatological or bodily one; for body will effect these things upon the mind, when the mind can do no such thing upon itself; and therefore the shortest, most useful, and most philosophical way of proceeding, is to treat the phenomenon in the manner most serviceable to the health and comfort of both. We subjoin the conclusion of Kubla Khan, as beginning with an exquisite piece of music, and ending with a most poetical phantasm :

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw ;

It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she play'd,
Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long

I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry Beware, Beware,
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread;
For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drank of the milk of Paradise.

If horrible and fantastic dreams are the most perplexing, there are pathetic ones more saddening. A friend dreaming of the loss of his friend, or a lover of that of his mistress, or a kinsman of that of a dear relation, is steeped in the bitterness of death. To wake and find it not true,-what a delicious sensation is that! On the other hand, to dream of a friend or a beloved relative restored to us,-to live over again the hours of childhood at the knee of a beloved mother, to be on the eve of marrying an affectionate mistress, with a thousand other joys snatched back out of the grave, and too painful to dwell upon,— what a dreary rush of sensation comes like a shadow upon us when we awake! How true, and divested of all that is justly called conceit in poetry, is that termination of Milton's sonnet on dreaming of his deceased wife,

But oh, as to embrace me she inclined,

I waked; she fled; and day brought back my night.

It is strange that so good and cordial a critic as Warton should think this a mere conceit on his blindness. An allusion to his blindness may or may not be involved in it; but the sense of returning shadow on the mind is true to nature, and must have been experienced by every one who has lost a person dear to him. There is a beautiful sonnet by Camoens on a similar occasion; a small canzone by Sanazzaro, which ends with saying, that although he waked and missed his lady's hand in his, he still tried to cheat himself by keeping his eyes shut; and three divine dreams of Laura by Petrarch, Sonnet xxxiv., Vol. 2, Sonnet lxxix., ib., and the canzone beginning

Quando il soave mio fido conforto.

But we must be cautious how we think of the poets on this

most poetical subject, or we shall write three articles instead of one. As it is, we have not left ourselves room for some very agreeable dreams, which we meant to have taken between these our gallant and imaginative sheets. They must be interrupted, as they are apt to be, like the young lady's in the Adventures of a Lapdog, who blushing divinely, had just uttered the words, "My Lord, I am wholly yours," when she was awaked by the jumping up of that officious little puppy.

CHAPTER LVIII.

A Human Animal, and the other Extreme.

WE met the other day with the following description of an animal of quality in a Biographical Dictionary that was published in the year 1767, and which is one of the most amusing and spirited publications of the kind that we remember to have seen. The writer does not give his authority for this particular memoir, so that it was probably furnished from his own know. ledge; but that the account is a true one is evident. Indeed, with the exception of one or two eccentricities of prudence, which rather lean to the side of an excess of instinct, it is but an individual description, referring to a numerous class of the same nature, that once flourished with horn and hound in this country, and specimens of which are to be found here and there still.* The title we have put at the. head of it is not quite correct and exclusive enough as a definition; since, properly speaking, we lords of the creation are all human animals; but the mere animal, or bodily and breathing faculty, is combined in us more or less with intellect and sentiment; and of these refinements of the perception, few bipeds that have arrived at the dignity of a coat and boots, have partaken so little as the noble squire before us. How far some of us, who take ourselves for very rational persons, do or do not go beyond him, we shall perhaps see in the course of our remarks.

"The Honorable William Hastings, a gentleman of a very singular character," says our informant, "lived in the year 1638, and by his quality was son, brother, and uncle to the Earls of

Since writing this, we have discovered that the original is in Hutchins's History of Dorsetshire. See Gilpin's Forest Scenery or Drake's Shakspeare and his Times. It is said to have been written by the first Earl of Shaftesbury.