stud of
them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look
at me; but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their
presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my
imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams
are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of
architecture and of buildings--cities abroad, which I have never seen,
and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length
of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon--their churches,
palaces, squares, marketplaces, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an
inexpressible sense of delight--a map-like distinctness of trace--and
a daylight vividness of vision, that was all but being awake.--I have
formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells--my highest Alps,--but
they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition;
and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the
inner eye, to make out a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn.
Methought I was in that country, but the mountains were gone. The
poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will can
conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and
Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abora, and caverns,

Where Alph, the sacred river, runs,

to solace his night solitudes--when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry
Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in
nocturnal visions, and proclaiming sons born to Neptune--when my
stretch of imaginative activity can hardly, in the night season, raise
up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my failures in somewhat a
mortifying light--it was after reading the noble Dream of this poet,
that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra; and the poor
plastic power, such as it is, within me set to work, to humour my
folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the
ocean billows at some sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the
customary train sounding their conchs before me, (I myself, you may be
sure, the _leading god_,) and jollily we went careering over the main,
till just where Ino Leucothea should have greeted me (I think it was
Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from
a sea-roughness to a sea-calm, and thence to a river-motion, and that
river (as happens in the familiarisation of dreams) was no other than
the gentle Thames, which landed me, in the