of the waking state, which last is very apt to be a half-sleep." The Doctor for his own part declares, "I have many times stopped short and held my breath, and felt the blood leaving my cheeks, in one of these sudden clairvoyant flashes." But the full disclosure of the Secret of which these hints are a premonition will never be made to us, he concludes, in this life.

'The imagination,” remarks Keats, with delightful suggestiveness, "may be compared to Adam's dream -'He awoke and found it truth.'” The dream referred to occurs, as will be remembered, in “Paradise Lost," where Adam, having sought companionship in vain from all hitherto created things, wearied with his loneliness, falls asleep at last and dreams of his as yet unmet-with Eve. Recounting the dream to his celestial visitor, Raphael, he concludes—

"She disappeared and left me dark; I waked
To find her, or for ever to deplore

Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure :
When out of hope, behold her, not far off,
Such as I saw her in my dream, adorned
With all that earth or heaven could bestow
To make her amiable."

Adam's dream, with its rapturous waking to joy, seems to link itself with Milton's own dream, as told in one of his best-known sonnets, of his dead wife who appeared to him, "like Alcestis from the grave," clad all in white:

"Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight

Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined

So clear, as in no face with more delight.

But, oh, as to embrace me she inclined,

I waked; she fled; and day brought back my night."

To these lines, so touching in their presentment of the mighty poet, after his brief dream-vision of bliss, bereft at daybreak of love and light at once, may we not apply Keats's saying? May we not trust that the blind poet awoke at last from life's long shadows and, like his own Adam, found his dream truth?

It is in "Animâ Poeta" that Coleridge has this lovely passage: "I awake and find my beloved asleep, gaze upon her by the taper that feebly illumines the darkness, then fall asleep by her side; and we both awake together for good and all in the broad daylight of heaven."

One of our forgotten and depreciated laureates, William Whitehead, has given expression to the thought, in his poem "The Firmament," in stanzas which might have added to the fame of a better poet :

"This world I deem

But a beautiful dream

Of shadows that are not what they seem;
Where visions arise,

Giving dim surmise

Of the sights that shall meet our waking eyes.

I gazed o’erhead

Where Thy hand hath spread

For the waters of heaven their crystal bed;
And stored the dew

In its depths of blue,

Which the fires of the sun come tempered through.

Soft they shine

Through that pure shrine,

As beneath the veil of Thy flesh divine

Beamed forth the light

That was else too bright

For the feebleness of a sinner's sight.

And such I deem

The world will seem

When we waken from life's uncertain dream,

And burst the shell

Where our spirits dwell

In this wondrous ante-natal cell."

And, in his emphatic style, Browning concludes of those who have passed beyond our sight

"Whatever they are, we seem:
Imagine the thing they know.
All things they do, we dream ;
Can heaven be else but so?" I

It is true Browning also and more characteristically declares

"This world and life's too big to pass for a dream."

A saying of the pious poet-philosopher, Novalis, as quoted by Mr. William Canton, expresses it may be most nearly the truth on the matter. "This world is not a dream, but it ought to become one, and perhaps it will." For to most of us all things at times seem dream-like, and yet there are things in all our lives which we know to be not of the stuff that dreams are made of, and that in eternity itself will move us even by their memory to thoughts as deep and tender as any we may hereafter owe to Heaven.

XXIII

WAYFARING TO HEAVEN

"Since every man who lives is born to die, And none can boast sincere felicity,

With equal mind, what happens, let us bear,

Nor joy, nor grieve too much for things beyond our care.
Like pilgrims to th' appointed place we tend,

The world's an inn, and death the journey's end."

Dryden: "Palamon and Arcite."

THE above passage is perhaps the most familiar setting of this oft-recurring comparison of the world to an inn, in which immortal spirits lodge awhile on their journey heavenwards. "I depart from life as from an inn, not as from my home," said Cicero. "But what happens in the world?" asks Epictetus, with a beautiful elaboration of the idea. "As though a man journeying to his own country should pass by and rest at a fair inn, and the inn being a delight to him, should abide in it. Man, thou hast forgotten thy purpose: thy journeying was not to this, but through this. 'But this is pleasant.' And how many other inns are pleasant, and how many meadows? yet only so as that a man should pass through them." I

Inn.'

Quoted by Lord Houghton as heading to his poem, “The

The same thought forms one of the arguments in that consoling protest, from Soame Jenyns' writings, against the fear of death, on which Dr. Johnson made the comment, "These are sentiments, which, though not new, may be read with pleasure and profit in the thousandth repetition." If we consider death, says Jenyns, "as a passage to a more perfect state, or a remove only in an eternal succession of still improving states (for which we have the strongest reasons), it will then appear a new favour from the Divine munificence; and a man must be as absurd to repine at dying, as a traveller would be who proposed to himself a delightful tour through various unknown countries, to lament that he cannot take up his residence at the first dirty inn which he baits at on the road."

A beautiful practical illustration of this pilgrim attitude towards the world was afforded by the pious Archbishop Leighton, as given by Bishop Burnet in his "Own Times." "He used often to say," relates Burnet, “that, if he were to choose a place to die in, it should be an inn-it looked like a pilgrim's going home, to whom all this world was as an inn, and who was weary of the noise and confusion in it. . . . And,” adds the chronicler, "he obtained what he desired, for he died in Bull Inn, in Warwickshire Lane" [London].

The presumption of the old writers seems to have been in accordance with Plato's theory, that, as the world is not the end, so neither was it the beginning of our pilgrimage. In simpler perceptions it is as a pilgrimage complete in itself, that this life is con