sleep accompanied by dreams which
are sometimes terrible nightmares. If this be so we can but hope for
dawn and waking, and wish soon to hear the crowing of the cock which
will put to flight the phantoms of the night. Happy should we be if we
had a certainty that it would be so!

This reminds me of a fine passage in a Spanish poet, which I cannot
refrain from quoting: "To live is to dream; experience teaches that man
dreams what he is till the moment of awakening. The king dreams that he
is a king and passes his days in the error, giving orders and disposing
of life and property. The rich man dreams the wealth that is the cause
of his anxiety; the poor man dreams the poverty and need from which he
suffers. I too dream that I am here laden with chains, and in by-gone
days I dreamt that I was happy. Our dreams are but dreams within a
dream."

So our world may be compared with the cave of which Plato speaks in the
Seventh Book of the _Republic_. In the conversation between Dr Hodgson
and George Pelham, when George Pelham promised that if he were the first
to die and if he found that he had another life he would do all that he
could to prove its existence, they referred to the old Platonic myth. In
the communications of the so-called George Pelham allusion was made to
the allegory, and that justifies me in briefly recalling it.

Plato imagines prisoners who from their birth have been enchained in a
dark cave in such a way that they are not able either to move or to turn
their heads, and can only look straight in front of them. Behind and
above the captives a great fire burns, and between the fire and the
captives men pass to and fro carrying in their hands vessels, statues,
images of animals and plants, and many other objects. The shadows of
these men and of the objects that they carry are thrown upon that wall
of the cavern which is opposite to the captives, who thus know nothing
of the external world but these shadows which they take to be realities,
and they spend their time discussing the shadows, naming them and
classifying them.

One of the captives is carried off from the gloomy place and transported
into the external world. At first the light dazzles him and he can
distinguish nothing. But by degrees, as time goes on, his sight adapts
itself to its surroundings and he learns to look upon the stars and
moon, and the sun itself. When he has been brought back into the cave
and again sits beside his companions, he