n the remainder
of the body. There is no distinction on the face of our experiences; one
is vivid indeed, and one dull, and one pleasant, and another agonising
to remember; but which of them is what we call true, and which a dream,
there is not one hair to prove. The past stands on a precarious footing;
another straw split in the field of metaphysic, and behold us robbed of
it. There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a
claim to some dormant title or some castle and estate: a claim not
prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering to the fancy and a
great alleviation of idle hours. A man's claim to his own past is yet
less valid. A paper might turn up (in proper story-book fashion) in the
secret drawer of an old ebony secretary, and restore your family to its
ancient honours and reinstate mine in a certain West Indian islet (not
far from St. Kitt's, as beloved tradition hummed in my young ears) which
was once ours, and is now unjustly some one else's, and for that matter
(in the state of the sugar trade) is not worth anything to anybody. I do
not say that these revolutions are likely; only no man can deny that
they are possible; and the past, on the other hand, is lost for ever:
our old days and deeds, our old selves, too, and the very world in which
these scenes were acted, all brought down to the same faint residuum as
a last night's dream, to some incontinuous images, and an echo in the
chambers of the brain. Not an hour, not a mood, not a glance of the eye,
can we revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring. And yet conceive us
robbed of it, conceive that little thread of memory that we trail behind
us broken at the pocket's edge; and in what naked nullity should we be
left! for we only guide ourselves, and only know ourselves, by these
air-painted pictures of the past.

Upon these grounds, there are some among us who claim to have lived
longer and more richly than their neighbours; when they lay asleep they
claim they were still active; and among the treasures of memory that all
men review for their amusement, these count in no second place the
harvests of their dreams. There is one of this kind whom I have in my
eye, and whose case is perhaps unusual enough to be described. He was
from a child an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer. When he had a touch of
fever at night, and the room swelled and shrank, and his clothes,
hanging on a nail, now loomed up instant to the bigness of a church, and
no