So sings Edgar Allan Poe, the weirdness of whose verse is humanised by such exquisitely tender touches. Often has comfort been thus poured on the bereaved heart; and, according to Dante, were we more attentive to spiritual influences such comfort might reach us oftener. Beatrice complains to her angelic attendants of her lover, that as soon as she had changed her mortal for immortal he forsook her, and gave himself to others. "Nor," she says, "availed me aught To sue for inspirations, with the which, Dante himself is said to have appeared to his son, Jacobo di Dante, in a dream. Not tinged with the smoke of the Inferno, as he had seemed to the women of Ferrara during his exile, but fitly, as if straight from Paradise and the arms of his Beatrice, “clad in very white raiment, his face shining with unaccustomed light." And to his son's question if he were living, he made reply, "Yes, but in the true life, not yours." It was Dante, too, after his death, who suggested to the painter Giotto in a dream, according to Giotto's story, a series of Apocalyptic scenes known as the "Invenzione di Dante." It is seldom that these dream-meetings have any specific object, except to soothe our hearts with their reflection, however shadowy and fleeting, of the past. But occasionally, in whatever way the circumstance may be regarded, some definite prediction or item of intelligence is conveyed through their means, A striking instance is recorded by Browning, in his Life, by Mrs. Sutherland Orr. Mrs. Browning passed away in June, 1861. On July 21, 1863, the poet made the following note: "Arabel [his wife's sister] told me yesterday that she had been much agitated by a dream which happened the night before, Sunday, July 19th. She saw Her and asked, 'When shall I be with you?' The reply was, 'Dearest, in five years.' Whereupon Arabella woke. She knew in her dream that it was not to the living she spoke." Within a month of the completion of these five years the prediction was fulfilled. Miss Barrett died in the poet's arms, as her sister had done seven years before. "You know I am not superstitious," wrote Browning, describing the event to his own and his wife's friend, Isa Blagden. "I had forgotten the date of the dream, and supposed it was only three years ago, and that two had still to run." And he makes the characteristic comment, "Only a coincidence, but noticeable." It was, so the story runs as related in “The Percy Anecdotes," in fulfilment of a solemn engagement that Dr. Archibald Pitcairne, the once celebrated Edinburgh physician, received a similar visit, involving a special announcement. He and a friend of his, one Lindsey, in their youthful days, having been much impressed by the story of the two platonic philosophers who promised each other that the one who died first should visit his surviving companion, entered into a like compact on their own account. Soon after, Dr. Pitcairne, being at his father's house in Fife, “ dreamed one morning that Lindsey, who was in Paris, camę to him and told him he was not dead, as was commonly reported, but still alive, and lived in a very agreeable place to which he could not yet carry him. In the course of the post news came of Lindsey's death, which happened very suddenly on the morning of the dream." Heaven comes down to us, and we ascend to heaven in our dreams. Novalis, in one of his " Hymns to the Night," tells how, watching by the grave which hid from him his beloved, he fell asleep, and beheld in a dream her transfigured features; how he clasped her hand, and read eternity in her eyes; while the centuries of ages which, as it seemed to him, had kept them apart, rolled away from the scene of their recovered bliss, and he wept tears of rapture on her neck. And how, ever since this, his first, his only dream, he calls it, night had been to him a revealer of heaven, and his beloved had shone through the darkness like a sun. With such dreams was Milton's lonely gloom beguiled, did Petrarch strive to lift himself into that blissful region wherein she dwelt whom he vainly sought on earth, to gaze on her once more, even to feel the touch of her hand, and to hear her voice assuring him— "Within this sphere If hope deceive not, thou shalt dwell with me Of beauty thou dost love shall wear again.” 1 I ... Till, alas! the dream failed, being but a dream, and silence and vain desire returned upon his soul. I “Levommi il mio Pensiero": translated by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. In his poem, "Another Way," Mr. Andrew Lang expresses the shrinking that some experience from such shadowy encounters in the pale realms of sleep, looking forward rather to a final meeting in that “true life" of which Dante spoke "Come to me in my dreams, and then, Not thus would the poet meet with his beloved : "Nay, where thy land and people are, Nor mingle with the shapes that sweep, But if, perchance, the shadows break, Be thine the voice to welcome me." For, after all, it is never our very life that we live again in dreams, but only the more or less unsatisfying reflection of it. The old empty longing awakes as the dream fades and our sense of desolation returns with added force. Christina Rossetti, that keen interpreter of so many of our moods and yearnings, has expressed this mood But she points across the Border Land of dreams to the region where all happy dreams come true : too. "O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet, Watch the slow door, That opening, letting in, lets out no more." XV THE VANISHERS "There's not a wind can stir, Or beam pass by, But straight I think-though far— Henry Vaughan: "A Lament." JEAN PAUL RICHTER, in his sketch of Herder, quotes him as saying "that he would gladly communicate with a messenger from the spiritual world, and that he neither felt nor foreboded any of the awe or fear usually associated with the thought of such a communication." I Many of us, in moods of grief and exaltation, when the otherwise firm and fast boundaries between the seen and the unseen have become confused to our perceptions, have felt the same. Charlotte Brontë, after the death of her sisters Emily and Anne, prayed with passionate persistence for a glimpse of them. St. Augustine, through long years, kept up the entreaty to be vouchsafed some token from his mother Monica. And Bishop Wilberforce was wont 1 " German Life and Literature": Dr. Japp. |