To a perceptive subtlety so keen
As to confess themselves befool'd before,
In all that now they will avouch for most?
One man--like this--but only so much longer
As life is longer than a summer's day,
Believed himself a king upon his throne,
And play'd at hazard with his fellows' lives,
Who cheaply dream'd away their lives to him.
The sailor dream'd of tossing on the flood:
The soldier of his laurels grown in blood:
The lover of the beauty that he knew
Must yet dissolve to dusty residue:
The merchant and the miser of his bags
Of finger'd gold; the beggar of his rags:
And all this stage of earth on which we seem
Such busy actors, and the parts we play'd
Substantial as the shadow of a shade,
And Dreaming but a dream within a dream!

THE DREAM CALLED LIFE

Segismund's Speech Closing the 'Vida Es Sueno': Fitzgerald's Version

A dream it was in which I found myself,
And you that hail me now, then hailed me king,
In a brave palace that was all my own,
Within, and all without it, mine; until,
Drunk with excess of majesty and pride,
Methought I towered so high and swelled so wide
That of myself I burst the glittering bubble
Which my ambition had about me blown,
And all again was darkness. Such a dream
As this, in which I may be walking now;
Dispensing solemn justice to you shadows,
Who make believe to listen: but anon,
Kings, princes, captains, warriors, plume and steel,
Ay, even with all your airy theatre,
May flit into the air you seem to rend
With acclamations, leaving me to wake
In the dark tower; or dreaming that I wake
From this, that waking is; or this and that
Both waking or both dreaming;--such a doubt
Confounds and clouds our mortal life about.
But whether wake or dreaming, this I know,--
How dreamwise human glories come and go;
Whose momentary tenure not to break,
Walking as one who knows he soon may wake,
So fairly carry the full cup, so well
Disordered insolence and passion quell,
That there be nothing after to upbraid
Dreamer or doer in the part he played;
Whether to-morrow's dawn shall break the spell,
Or the last trumpet of the eternal Day,
When dreaming with the night shall pass away.

JOHN CALDWELL CALHOUN

(1782-1850)

BY W. P. TRENT

John C. Calhoun's importance as a statesman has natur