turbed by
waking himself in repeating a verse aloud. "This night I awaked with this
verse in my mouth--

"_E i duo che manda il nero adusto suolo_.
The two, the _dark_ and burning soil has sent."

He discovered that the epithet _black_ was not suitable; "I again fell
asleep, and in a dream I read in Strabo that the sand of Ethiopia and
Arabia is extremely _white_, and this morning I have found the place. You
see what learned dreams I have."

But incidents of this nature are not peculiar to this great bard. The
_improvvisatori_ poets, we are told, cannot sleep after an evening's
effusion; the rhymes are still ringing in their ears, and imagination, if
they have any, will still haunt them. Their previous state of excitement
breaks into the calm of sleep; for, like the ocean, when its swell is
subsiding, the waves still heave and beat. A poet, whether a Milton or a
Blackmore, will ever find that his muse will visit his "slumbers nightly."
His fate is much harder than that of the great minister, Sir Robert
Walpole, who on retiring to rest could throw aside his political intrigues
with his clothes; but Sir Robert, to judge by his portrait and anecdotes
of him, had a sleekiness and good-humour, and an unalterable equanimity of
countenance, not the portion of men of genius: indeed one of these has
regretted that his sleep was so profound as not to be interrupted by
dreams; from a throng of fantastic ideas he imagined that he could have
drawn new sources of poetic imagery. The historian DE THOU was one of
those great literary characters who, all his life, was preparing to write
the history which he afterwards composed; omitting nothing in his travels
and his embassies, which went to the formation of a great man. DE THOU has
given a very curious account of his dreams. Such was his passion for
study, and his ardent admiration of the great men whom he conversed with,
that he often imagined in his sleep that he was travelling in Italy,
Germany, and in England, where he saw and consulted the learned, and
examined their curious libraries. He had all his lifetime these literary
dreams, but more particularly in his travels they reflected these images
of the day.

If memory do not chain down these hurrying fading children of the
imagination, and

Snatch the faithless fugitives to light

with the beams of the morning, the mind suddenly finds itself forsaken and
solitary.[A] ROUSSEAU has uttered a complaint on this occasion.