48 ON THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN MENTilL 



sleep without the mind — OTie sense may be in action, and the re- 

 mainder chained in the fetters of undisturbed repose. The memory 

 may be active, the imagination dormant ; the latter may be " girdl- 

 ing the earth," whilst the former, together with the judgment, have 

 left the mind governed by the fancy alone. The latter is by far 

 the most ordinary state during sleep. The Imagination being en- 

 dowed with tenfold life and power, whilst, it should seem, the re- 

 maining faculties have given up the peculiarities of their existence 

 for a time, in order to concentrate the whole mental force in the 

 brilliancy and vigour of the Imagination. 



Byron, with his usual characteristics of poetical beauty and men- 

 ial or physical truth, has admirably depicted this activity of the 

 Imagination daring sleep ; 



" Sleep hath its own world, 

 A boundary between the things misnamed 

 Death and existence : Sleep hath its own world. 

 And a wide realm of wild reality : 

 And dreams, in their development, have breath. 

 And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy ; 

 They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,. 

 They take a weight from off our waking toils ; 

 They do divide our being ; they become 

 A portion of ourselves, as of our time, 

 And look like heralds of eternity ; 

 They pass like spirits of the past — they speak 

 Like sybils of the future ; they have power — 

 The tyranny of pleasure and of pain ; 

 They make us what we were not— what they will. 

 And shake us with the vision that 's gone byr 

 The dread of vanished shadows. — Are they so ?- 

 Is not the past all shadow ? What are they ? 

 Creations of the mind ? The mind can maK^e 

 Substance, and people shadows of its own 

 With beings brighter than have been, and give 

 A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh."* 



Ta remark upon one idea in this most beautiful passage. It does 

 not appear that the mind has the power of creation — of forming 

 things actually new from materials of its own production. The 

 Imagination, which, if creation there be, possesses sdely the creative 

 power, does, indeed, form scenes which have never before existed ; 

 but the materials of these scenes are derived, as I have before stated, 

 from objects which have been presented to the mind through the 



• The Dream. 



