would have come self-pictured in some shape or other

Headless bear, black man, or ape9

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.10 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 story - finds all this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded ab extra, in his own "thick-coming fancies;" 11 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, 12 and Hydras, 13 and Chimæras 14-dire stories of Celæno and the Harpies 15-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,
Fray us with things that be not ? 16

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

demons

are 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 shadowland 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 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 trace—and a daylight vividness of vision, that was all but being awake. I have formerly * Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.

travelled among the Westmoreland fells 17-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,18 to make out a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. 19 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 Abara, and caverns,

Where Alph, the sacred river, runs,20

to solace his night solitudes when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall 21 has his tritons and his nereids gambolling 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 humour 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 conchs before me, (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god,) and jollily we went careering over the main, till just where Ino Lucothea 22 should have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from a sea-roughness 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 gen

tle Thames, which landed me, in the wafture of a placid wave or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth palace.

23

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 humourist, 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.

1

VALENTINE'S DAY

HAIL to thy returning festival, old Bishop Valentine! Great is thy name in the rubric, thou venerable Arch-flamen of Hymen!2 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,5 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

3

4

6

3

Brush'd 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, ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross each other at every street and turning. The weary and all forspent twopenny 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