What, for instance, must have been the dreams of men who had walked by moonlight, under the shadows of the tombs of departed kings, for the remembrance of whose greatness no works could suffice, but such as might last with the world itself; or paced the solemn avenues filled with endless repetitions of that strange form, which, perhaps, symbolized one of the great secrets of the universe; or had heard the Memnon hail the morning sun with miraculous melody; or on the plains of Thebes had looked up to those colossal Amunophs, which sit even now as if they could never be moved,-sedent æternumque sedebunt,—or had worshipped and partaken of unutterable rites among those pillars of Dendera, where

"marble demons watch

The Zodiac's brazen mystery, and dead men

Hang their mute thoughts on the dead walls around;"

or had followed the loved and lost to the gloomy lake of the dead, and had heard the earthly rehearsal of the future trial by the forty assessors of human actions, which was to be actually undergone in other worlds, in the dread presence of Osiris! What the dreams of those who had trembled in the caverns of Elephanta or Ellora, in sight of those awful deities, into whose forms the rocks themselves seem to have grown, rather than the forms to have been carved by human hands, and there heard of Seeva the destroyer, and of the avenging Avatar of Brama! Less startling, and often lovely were the visions of those who could dream in Arcadia of scenes,

"where universal Pan,

Knit with the Graces, and the Hours, in dance
Led on the eternal spring;"

or on the banks of Ilissus, or in the shadows of Pelion, could follow the shapes of

"Sileni, and sylvans, and fawns,

And the nymphs of the woods and waves;"

though sometimes there might be gloomier intimations of a retributive Nemesis, and unconquerable Destiny, and even Pallas herself might "frown severe."

It would be wearisome to my hearers to carry a like train of thought to the Scandinavian Pantheon,-to the halls of Odin, the regions of the Thunder-God,-to the Gods and Heroes of our ancestors; or across the Atlantic to those primeval cities and monuments, overgrown by monstrous forests, in Yucatan. Yet wherever we trace the footsteps of the religions of by-gone ages, we feel assured that the same tracks were haunted by the dreams of the men of old.

But it is enough to bear in mind what we experience in our own nightly visions. Dreams are much to be honoured and valued, seeing that in the wonderful shapes of thought which they sometimes present to us, we are gifted with conceptions of the ideal,—divine possibilities,-a consummation of grandeur and beauty, beyond anything which actual life can furnish ;-glimpses of

"Worlds, whose course is equable and pure,

more pellucid streams,

An ampler ether, a diviner air,

And fields invested with purpureal gleams;

Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day
Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey."

And thus, like the revelations of philosophy, the embodiments

* "And Pallas frowned severe."-LANDOR's Hellenics. "Shades of Iphigenia and Agamemnon."

H

of art, and the inspirations of poetry, dreams, too, may tend to refine and sublimate our thoughts, weaning us from low desires, and raising our aspirations towards a state of existence, of which all that here is best, and fairest, and greatest, is but a faint shadow, and may be remembered. in that purer world, like one of the most incomplete of our earthly visions; as a dream, in which whatever was beautiful was in fragments, in which the mean and the sublime were incongruously intermingled, and in which moral perfection was ever eluding the grasp; in which love was not free from some alloy of selfishness, nor hope unmixed with fear.

The End.

EVANS AND ABBOTT, PRINTERS, CLARE-STREET, BRISTOL.