head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life-so far as memory serves in things so long ago-without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel-(0 that old man covered with a mantle!)-I owe-not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy-but the shape and manner of their visitations. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sate upon my pillow-a sure bedfellow, when my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the daylight, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the window, aversely from the bed where my witchridden pillow was.-Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm-the hoping for a familiar voice-when they wake screaming—and find none to soothe them—what a terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves! The keeping them up till midnight, through candle-light and the unwholesome hours, as they are called,-would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the better caution. That detestable picture, as I have said, gave the fashion to my dreams-if dreams they were -for the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay. Had I never met with the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape or other Headless bear, black man, or ape but, as it was, my imaginations took that form.-It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them a direction. Dear little T. H., who of all children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition-who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or hear of any distressing storyfinds all this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded ab extra, in his own "thick-coming fancies;" and from his little midnight pillow, this nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity. Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimæras dire-stories of Celano and the Harpies-may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition-but they were there before. They are transcripts, types the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking sense to be false, come to affect us at all ?-or Names, whose sense we see not, Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury?—O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body-or, without the body, they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in Dante-tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demonsare they one-half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied following him Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turn'd round, walks on And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.* That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual-that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth—that it predominates in the period of sinless infancy-are difficulties, the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadow-land of pre-existence. My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional night-mare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will * Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. come and look at me; but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of architecture and of buildings-cities abroad, which I have never seen, and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon-their churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight,—a map-like distinctness of traceand a day-light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake.I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells-my highest Alps, but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition; and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that country, but the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will, can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla-Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abora, and caverns, Where Alph, the sacred river, runs, to solace his night solitudes-when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in nocturnal visions, and proclaiming sons born to Neptune— when my stretch of imaginative activity can hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my failures in somewhat a mortifying light-it was after reading the noble Dream of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra ; and the poor plastic power, such as it is, within me set to work, to humor my folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the ocean billows at some sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the customary train sounding their conches before me (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god), and jollily we went careering over the main, till just where Ino Leucothea should have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from a searoughness to a sea-calm, and thence to a river motion, and that river (as happens in the familiarisation of dreams) was no other than the gentle Thames, which landed me in the wafture of a placid wave or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth palace. The degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking. An old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humorist, used to carry this notion so far, that when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of becoming a poet, his first question would be," Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" I have so much faith in my old friend's theory, that when I feel that idle vein returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious inland landing. VALENTINE'S DAY. HAIL to thy returning festival, old Bishop Valentine! Great is thy name in the rubric, thou venerable Arch-flamen of Hymen ! Immortal Go-between; who and what manner of person art thou? Art thou but a name, typifying the restless principle which impels poor humans to seek perfection in union? or wert thou indeed mortal prelate, with thy tippet and thy rochet, thy apron on, and decent lawn sleeves? Mysterious personage! like unto thee, assuredly there is no other mitred father in the calendar; not Jerome, nor Ambrose, nor Cyril; nor the consigner of undipt infants to eternal torments, Austin, whom all mothers hate; nor he who hated all mothers, Origen; nor Bishop Bull, nor Archbishop Parker, nor Whitgift. Thou comest attended with thousands and ten thousands of little Loves, and the air is Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings. Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy precentors; and instead of the crosier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee. In other words, this is the day on which those charming little missives, yclept Valentines, cross and intercross each other at every street and turning. The weary and all for-spent two-penny postman sinks beneath a load of delicate embarrassments, not his own. It is scarcely credible to what an extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on in this loving town, to the great enrichment of porters, and detriment of knockers and bell-wires. In these little visual interpretations, no emblem is so common as the heart, -that little three-cornered exponent of all our hopes and fears,— the bestuck and bleeding heart; it is twisted and tortured into |