summed up in the brief sentence-Realities transcend all dreams.

His remark, uttered the third part of a century ago, has since received new and emphatic confirmations from the new explorings of science. Dreams the most celestial or eccentric, imaginings the most exalted or extreme, are abundantly outgone by the ascertained and visible facts of creation: how much more, it is inevitable to conclude, by the realities which are "not seen."

What are the visions, the reveries, or the fictions of men,-the most oriental stretch of mythic hyperbole, -the most ultramundane dream of the astrologer Cardan,—or the boldest flights of a Dante,-when compared with the telescopic distinction of confused nebular light into constellations or clusters of starry globes; or with that recent fact, the new planet of Leverrier, whose distance,—not incalculable, but the astonishing subject of successful calculation,-gives us a new standard for estimating the immensities of God's works, and the exceeding broadness of His one law and sovereignty, by the amazing vastness of our one solar system,-one amidst

SURPASS ALL DREAMS.

167

systems whose multitude must baffle human research.

Since then even visible realities thus transcend our most excursive dreams, how much more, I repeat, the invisible ! and how should hallowed ambition, tempered by profound humility, aspire to rise from man's frail imaginations towards his Maker's real and eternal grandeur, and from all visionary and evanescent good towards the permanent "certainty of waking bliss!"

NOTES.

NOTE A, p. 32.

KUBLA KHAN.

THE reader may wish for the remaining lines preserved by the poet; which are these:

"A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
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 drunk the milk of paradise."

All who loved the poet, or who honoured his genius, must have earnestly wished that in those early days he had restricted himself to genuine and harmless

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OPIUM.

KENILWORTH.

"milk" or "honey," instead of indulging in pernicious stimulants. Most devoutly did he himself wish this when he felt their fatal effects; and after he was at last so happily rescued from that baneful snare of opium, which had once attracted him as if it were "the milk of paradise;" but proved, as we learn from what he confessed and recorded, a wine of demons, a very "cup of trembling."

It is probable, since he writes of having taken an anodyne," that the "vision in a dream" arose under some excitement of that same narcotic: but this does not destroy, even as to his particular case, the evidence for a wonderfully inventive action of the mind in sleep; for, whatever were the exciting cause, the fact remains the same: although, doubtless, where there has been no stimulus of the sort, the instances are still more to our purpose. Such a one is the following: a piece kindly supplied me by a lady, composed by herself in sleep, after reading Sir Walter Scott's Kenilworth.""

66

KENILWORTH CASTLE.

(Composed in sleep.)

"In the tower I stood, and looked ont on the lea, Which slept in the moonlight peacefully.

Ah! many a moon has passed away,

And many a head been strewed with gray,
Since these walls, which now echo the owlet's cry,
First reared their strength in the azure sky.

The bat now dwells where the dancers shone,
And the passing wind sighs for music gone;
And in place of the torch's glaring blaze,
The quivering moonbeam gently strays.

See his most affecting letters of April, May, and June, 1814, in "Cottle's early recollections" of him.-Vol. ii. pp. 156, 161, 166, 186.