196 ON THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN MENTAL, &C. 



longer painful to dwell upon, but the detail of its incidents 

 removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction, and its passions 

 exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. All this was to be had for five 

 shillings; and over and above the music of the stage and the or- 

 chestra, I had all around me, in the intervals of the performance, 

 the music of the Italian language talked by Italian women — for the 

 gallery was usually crowded with Italians — ^and I listened with a 

 pleasure such as that with which Weld, the traveller, lay and 

 listened, in Canada, to the sweet laughter of the Indian women ; 

 for the less we understand of a language, the more sensible we are 

 to the melody or harshness of its sounds ; for such a purpose, there- 

 fore, it was an advantage to me, that I was a poor Italian scholar, 

 reading it but little, and not speaking it at all, nor understanding a 

 tenth part of what I heard spoken." 



I have now traced the history of the general phenomena of the 

 imagination, as a component part of the sound mind, in its healthy 

 or natural state. We have seen the peculiarities induced in its ex- 

 ercise by climate, constitution, and education ; and also the modifi- 

 cation impressed upon it by other moral and physical agents, as the 

 passions, wine, and opium. In the next lecture, I shall pass to 

 the consideration of the imagination during sleep, as it is manifested 

 in the phenomena of dreaming, and to the effects of certain agents 

 upon it in this state, which exalt and change its mode of action. 



[The subsequent four Lectures on the Imagination, consisting of the Ima- 

 gination of Dreamers,— of Sleep-walkers,— of the Insane,— and on the Hal- 

 lucinations produced by the Imagination, will appear in subsequent numbers 

 of Tfte Analyst.} 



