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 Chimeras 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 ar. 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 Neptunewhen 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, remembing those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious inland larcurg. 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 a 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 more allegories and affectations than an opera hat. What authority we have in history or mythology for placing the headquarters and metropolis of God Cupid in this anatomical seat rather than in any other, is not very clear; but we have got it, and it will serve as well as any other. Else we might easily imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for anything which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, "Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal;" or putting a delicate question, "Amanda, have you a midriff to bestow?" But custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of sentiment to the aforesaid triangle, while its less fortunate neighbors wait at animal and anatomical distance. Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door. It "gives a very echo to the throne where hope is seated." But its issues seldom answer to this oracle within. It is so seldom that just the person we want to see comes. But of all the clamorous visitations the welcomest in expectation is the sound that ushers in, or seems to usher in a Valentine. As the raven himself was hoarse that announced the fatal entrance of Duncan, so the knock of the postman on this day is light, airy, confident, and befitting one that bringeth good tidings. It is less mechanical than on other days; you will say, "That is not the post I am sure.” Visions of Love, of Cupids, of Hymens !-delightful eternal common-places, which "having been will always be;" which no school-boy nor schoolman can write away; having your irreversible throne in the fancy and affections-what are your transports, when the happy maiden, opening with careful finger, careful not to break the emblematic seal, bursts upon the sight of some well-designed allegory, some type, some youthful fancy, not without verses— Lovers all, or some such device, not over abundant in sense-young Love disclaims it, and not quite silly-something between wind and water, a chorus where the sheep might almost join the shepherd, as they did, or as I apprehend they did, in Arcadia. |