d Persic. To say truth, we never
anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as 'tis called),
to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we
suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and
headaches; Nature herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our
presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the
measures of that celestial and sleepless traveller. We deny not that
there is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially,
in these break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of
a lazy world; to conquer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of
sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually in strange qualms
before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion. Therefore,
while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, are
already up and about their occupations, content to have swallowed
their sleep by wholesale; we choose to linger a-bed, and digest our
dreams. It is the very time to recombine the wandering images, which
night in a confused mass presented; to snatch them from forgetfulness;
to shape, and mould them. Some people have no good of their dreams.
Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly, to taste them
curiously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to collect
the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with
firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to drag into day-light
a struggling and half-vanishing night-mare; to handle and examine the
terrors, or the airy solaces. We have too much respect for these
spiritual communications, to let them go so lightly. We are not so
stupid, or so careless, as that Imperial forgetter of his dreams, that
we should need a seer to remind us of the form of them. They seem to
us to have as much significance as our waking concerns; or rather to
import us more nearly, as more nearly we approach by years to the
shadowy world, whither we are hastening. We have shaken hands with the
world's business; we have done with it; we have discharged ourself of
it. Why should we get up? we have neither suit to solicit, nor affairs
to manage. The drama has shut in upon us at the fourth act. We have
nothing here to expect, but in a short time a sick bed, and a
dismissal. We delight to anticipate death by such shadows as night
affords. We are already half acquainted with ghosts. We were never
much in the world. Disappointment early struck a d