avenant
is certainly clever, and shows that Violet Fane can write prose that is
as good as her verse, and can look at life not merely from the point of
view of the poet, but also from the standpoint of the philosopher, the
keen observer, the fine social critic. To be a fine social critic is no
small thing, and to be able to incorporate in a work of fiction the
results of such careful observation is to achieve what is out of the
reach of many. The difficulty under which the novelists of our day
labour seems to me to be this: if they do not go into society, their
books are unreadable; and if they do go into society, they have no time
left for writing. However, Violet Fane has solved the problem.

The chronicles which I am about to present to the reader are not the
result of any conscious effort of the imagination. They are, as the
title-page indicates, records of dreams occurring at intervals during
the last ten years, and transcribed, pretty nearly in the order of
their occurrence, from my diary. Written down as soon as possible
after awaking from the slumber during which they presented themselves,
these narratives, necessarily unstudied in style, and wanting in
elegance of diction, have at least the merit of fresh and vivid
colour; for they were committed to paper at a moment when the effect
and impress of each successive vision were strong and forceful on the
mind. . . .

The most remarkable features of the experiences I am about to record
are the methodical consecutiveness of their sequences, and the
intelligent purpose disclosed alike in the events witnessed and in the
words heard or read. . . . I know of no parallel to this phenomenon,
unless in the pages of Bulwer Lytton's romance entitled The Pilgrims
of the Rhine, in which is related the story of a German student
endowed with so marvellous a faculty of dreaming, that for him the
normal conditions of sleeping and waking became reversed; his true
life was that which he lived in his slumbers, and his hours of
wakefulness appeared to him as so many uneventful and inactive
intervals of arrest, occurring in an existence of intense and vivid
interest which was wholly passed in the hypnotic state. . . .

During the whole period covered by these dreams I have been busily and
almost continuously engrossed with scientific and literary pursuits,
demanding accurate judgment and complete self