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What a singular moment is the first one, when
you have hardly begun to recollect yourself, after
starting from slumber! By unclosing your eyes so
suddenly, you seem to have surprised the personages
of your dream in full convocation round your bed,
and catch one broad glance at them before they can
flit into obscurity. Or, to vary the metaphor, you find
yourself, for a single instant, wide awake in that
realm of illusions, whither sleep has been the passport,
and behold its ghostly inhabitants and wondrous
scenery, with a perception of their strangeness, such
as you never attain while the dream is undisturbed.
The distant sound of a church clock is borne faintly
on the wind. You question with yourself, half seriously,
whether it has stolen to your waking ear from
some gray tower, that stood within the precincts of
your dream. While yet in suspense, another clock
flings its heavy clang over the slumbering town, with
so full and distinct a sound, and such a long murmur
in the neighboring air, that you are certain it must
proceed from the steeple at the nearest corner. You
count the strokes—one—two—and there they
cease, with a booming sound, like the gathering of a
third stroke within the bell.

If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of
the whole night, it would be this. Since your sober
bed-time, at eleven, you have had rest enough to take
off the pressure of yesterday's fatigue; while before
you, till the sun comes from “far Cathay” to brighten
your window, there is almost the space of a summer
night; one hour to be spent in thought, with the
mind's eye half shut, and two in pleasant dreams,

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and two in that strangest of employments, the forgetfulness
alike of joy and woe. The moment of rising
belongs to another period of time, and appears so
distant, that the plunge out of a warm bed into the
frosty air cannot yet be anticipated with dismay.
Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows
of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the
future. You have found an intermediate space,
where the business of life does not intrude; where
the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the
present; a spot where Father Time, when he thinks
nobody is watching him, sits down by the way-side to
take breath. O that he would fall asleep, and let
mortals live on without growing older!

Hitherto you have lain perfectly still, because the
slightest motion would dissipate the fragments of your
slumber. Now, being irrevocably awake, you peep
through the half-drawn window curtain, and observe
that the glass is ornamented with fanciful devices in
frost-work, and that each pane presents something
like a frozen dream. There will be time enough to
trace out the analogy, while waiting the summons to
breakfast. Seen through the clear portion of the
glass, where the silvery mountain peaks do not
ascend, the most conspicuous object is the steeple;
the white spire of which directs you to the wintry
lustre of the firmament. You may almost distinguish
the figures on the clock that has just told the hour.
Such a frosty sky, and the snow-covered roofs, and
the long vista of the frozen street, all white, and the
distant water hardened into rock, might make you
shiver, even under four blankets and a woollen comforter.
Yet look at that one glorious star! Its beams
are distinguishable from all the rest, and actually cast
the shadow of the casement on the bed, with a
radiance of deeper hue than moonlight, though not
so accurate an outline.

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You sink down and muffle your head in the
clothes, shivering all the while, but less from bodily
chill, than the bare idea of a polar atmosphere. It is
too cold even for the thoughts to venture abroad.
You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole
existence in bed, like an oyster in its shell, content
with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction, and drowsily
conscious of nothing but delicious warmth, such as
you now feel again. Ah! that idea has brought a
hideous one in its train. You think how the dead
are lying in their cold shrouds and narrow coffins,
through the drear winter of the grave, and cannot
persuade your fancy that they neither shrink nor
shiver, when the snow is drifting over their little
hillocks, and the bitter blast howls against the door
of the tomb. That gloomy thought will collect a
gloomy multitude, and throw its complexion over your
wakeful hours.

In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a
dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry
above may cause us to forget their existence, and the
buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But
sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles
are flung wide open. In an hour like this,
when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active
strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting
vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting
or controlling them,—then pray that your griefs may
slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break
their chain. It is too late! A funeral train comes
gliding by your bed, in which passion and feeling
assume bodily shape, and things of the mind become
dim spectres to the eye. There is your earliest sorrow,
a pale, young mourner, wearing a sister's likeness
to first love, sadly beautiful, with a hallowed sweetness
in her melancholy features, and grace in the flow of

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her sable robe. Next appears a shade of ruined
loveliness, with dust among her golden hair, and her
bright garments all faded and defaced, stealing from
your glance with drooping head, as fearful of reproach;
she was your fondest hope, but a delusive
one; so call her Disappointment now. A sterner
form succeeds, with a brow of wrinkles, a look and
gesture of iron authority: there is no name for him,
unless it be Fatality; an emblem of the evil influence
that rules your fortunes; a demon to whom you subjected
yourself by some error at the outset of life,
and were bound his slave forever, by once obeying
him. See! those fiendish lineaments graven on the
darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of
that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore
place in your heart! Do you remember any act of
enormous folly, at which you would blush, even in
the remotest cavern of the earth? Then recognize
your shame.

Pass, wretched band! Well for the wakeful one,
if, riotously miserable, a fiercer tribe do not surround
him, the devils of a guilty heart, that holds its hell
within itself. What if remorse should assume the
features of an injured friend? What if the fiend
should come in woman's garments, with a pale beauty
amid sin and desolation, and lie down by your side?
What if he should stand at your bed's foot, in the
likeness of a corpse, with a bloody stain upon the
shroud? Sufficient without such guilt is this night-mare
of the soul; this heavy, heavy sinking of the
spirits; this wintry gloom about the heart; this indistinct
horror of the mind, blending itself with the
darkness of the chamber.

By a desperate effort, you start upright, breaking
from a sort of conscious sleep, and gazing wildly
round the bed, as if the fiends were any where but in

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your haunted mind. At the same moment, the slumbering
embers on the hearth send forth a gleam which
palely illuminates the whole outer room, and flickers
through the door of the bed-chamber, but cannot
quite dispel its obscurity. Your eye searches for
whatever may remind you of the living world. With
eager minuteness, you take note of the table near the
fireplace, the book with an ivory knife between its
leaves, the unfolded letter, the hat, and the fallen
glove. Soon the flame vanishes, and with it the
whole scene is gone, though its image remains an instant
in your mind's eye, when darkness has swallowed
the reality. Throughout the chamber, there
is the same obscurity as before, but not the same
gloom within your breast. As your head falls back
upon the pillow, you think—in a whisper be it
spoken—how pleasant, in these night solitudes,
would be the rise and fall of a softer breathing than
your own, the slight pressure of a tenderer bosom, the
quiet throb of a purer heart, imparting its peacefulness
to your troubled one, as if the fond sleeper were involving
you in her dream!

Her influence is over you, though she have no
existence but in that momentary image. You sink
down in a flowery spot, on the borders of sleep and
wakefulness, while your thoughts rise before you in
pictures, all disconnected, yet all assimilated by a
pervading gladsomeness and beauty. The wheeling
of gorgeous squadrons, that glitter in the sun, is
succeeded by the merriment of children round the
door of a school-house, beneath the glimmering shadow
of old trees, at the corner of a rustic lane. You
stand in the sunny rain of a summer shower, and
wander among the sunny trees of an autumnal wood,
and look upward at the brightest of all rainbows,
overarching the unbroken sheet of snow, on the

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American side of Niagara. Your mind struggles
pleasantly between the dancing radiance round the
hearth of a young man and his recent bride, and the
twittering flight of birds in spring, about their newmade
nest. You feel the merry bounding of a ship
before the breeze; and watch the tuneful feet of rosy
girls, as they twine their last and merriest dance, in a
splendid ball-room; and find yourself in the brilliant
circle of a crowded theatre, as the curtain falls over
a light and airy scene.

With an involuntary start, you seize hold on consciousness,
and prove yourself but half awake, by
running a doubtful parallel between human life and
the hour which has now elapsed. In both you
emerge from mystery, pass through a vicissitude that
you can but imperfectly control, and are borne
onward to another mystery. Now comes the peal of
the distant clock, with fainter and fainter strokes as
you plunge farther into the wilderness of sleep. It is
the knell of a temporary death. Your spirit has
departed, and strays, like a free citizen, among the
people of a shadowy world, beholding strange sights,
yet without wonder or dismay. So calm, perhaps,
will be the final change; so undisturbed, as if among
familiar things, the entrance of the soul to its eternal
home!