XXII

THIS WORLD A DREAM

"Surely it is not a melancholy conceit to think we are all asleep in this world; and that the conceits of this life are as mere dreams to those of the next, as the phantasms of the night to the conceits of the day."

Sir Thomas Browne: "Religio Medici."

EVEN to such an abnormally wideawake man as Dickens this life presented itself, at least on one occasion, as a dream from which we are to be awakened by death. "Ah me! ah me!" he wrote on the going hence of a friend, "this tremendous sickle certainly does cut deep into the surrounding corn when one's own small blade has ripened. But this is all a dream, maybe, and death will wake us."

"Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream?" asked poor Keats. And he answered himself, as so many other poets have done: "There must be! We cannot be created for this sort of suffering." The thought was only a repetition in the near prospect of death (he died a few months later) of one to which Keats had already given expression in the following lines written at the age of eighteen :

ON DEATH.

"Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,
And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?
The transient pleasures as a vision seem,
And yet we think the greatest pain's to die.

How strange it is that man on earth should roam,
And lead a life of woe, but not forsake
His rugged path; nor dare he view alone

His future doom-which is but to awake."

Shelley's lines on the death of Keats, from Adonais, rise inevitably to the mind in this connection—

"Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!
He hath awakened from the dream of life.

'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife

He has outsoared the shadow of our night.

He lives, he wakes-'tis Death is dead, not he."

The passage bears a deeper significance than its context would seem to justify. But, to borrow Keble's saying, uttered, however, in reference to other poets than Shelley and Keats

"As little children dream and tell of heaven,

So thoughts beyond their thoughts to those high bards were given.”

In sleep, the mind is open to all sorts of wild impressions and vague unreasoning fears that pass over it like clouds on wings of storm and blackness, leaving their shadows behind. So too is the dream of life haunted all through by dim uneasiness,

"Blank misgivings of a creature

Moving about in worlds not realised." 1

I

Wordsworth: "Intimations of Immortality."

Even the cheerful Herrick makes it the chief feature of Heaven that there we shall no longer be a prey to the fears of darkness :

Few have been more subject to these depressing influences than Coleridge, and it was he who wrote—

"Believe thou, O my soul,

Life is a vision shadowy of truth;

And vice and anguish, and the wormy grave,
Shapes of a dream! The veiling clouds retire,

And lo! the throne of the redeeming God

Wraps in one light earth, heaven, and deepest hell!” 1

A view of life he maintained to the end.

Many poets, the Answerers, as Whitman calls them, of life's enigmas, consider the darker aspects of life merely as shadows cast from our mortality, through which gleams and glimpses of a brighter world continually break. George Herbert, dwelling on the

I "Religious Musings" (Christmas Eve, 1794).

unsubstantial quality of earth's joys, and the stubbornness of her griefs, exclaims—

But, oh, the folly of distracted men ;

Who griefs in earnest, joys in jest pursue;
Preferring, like brute beasts, a loathsome den
Before a Court, even that above so clear,
Where are no sorrows, but delights more true
Than miseries are here!"

A strain one would hardly have expected from the author of the poem beginning,

"Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

The bridal of the earth and sky,"

and who was not wont to glorify even Heaven at the expense of this world.

Moore attaches the same unreal character to both the joys and sorrows of this life—

"This world is all a fleeting show
For man's illusion given;
The smiles of joy, the tears of woe,
Deceitful shine, deceitful flow—

There's nothing true but heaven!"

"I am very fond of photographs," wrote Longfellow in a letter. "Did you ever examine what the photographers call the negative, in which all that is to be light is dark, and the reverse? If so, you will feel how beautiful was the remark made by a brother-inlaw of mine that this world is only the negative of the world to come, and what is dark here will be light hereafter."

Dr. George MacDonald, in the mystical strain of which he is a master, has put into language, so far as such incommunicable feelings can be put into language, in “Lilith," the impression as of one about to

wake from a vivid dream, which no doubt comes over almost every one, even the least imaginative, at times, and in the very midst, perhaps, of some exciting scene. "Now and then, when I look round on my books, they seem to waver as if a wind rippled their solid mass, and another world were about to break through. Sometimes when I am abroad, a like thing takes place; the heavens and the earth, the trees and the grass appear for a moment to shake as if about to pass away; then, lo, they have settled again into the old familiar face! At times I seem to hear whisperings around me, as if some that loved me were talking of me; but when I would distinguish the words, they cease, and all is very still. I know not whether these things rise in my brain, or enter it from without. I do not seek them; they come, and I let them go.

"Strange dim memories, which will not abide identification, often, through misty windows of the past, look out upon me in the broad daylight, but I never dream now. It may be, notwithstanding, that, when most awake, I am only dreaming the more! But when I wake at last into that life which, as a mother her child, carries this life in its bosom, I shall know that I wake, and shall doubt no more."

In the same vein writes the essentially practicalminded Oliver Wendell Holmes: "It is in the hearts of many men and women—let me add children—that there is a Great Secret waiting for them, a secret of which they get hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later years. These hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden startling flashes-second wakings as it were-a waking out