1826.] A Dream in Westminster Abbey. 509 
melted away, ‘their places were supplied by things of heaven. Before, 
however, the earthly oblivion, and consequent celestial creation, were 
complete, the moon, pointing a few rays through among the towers and 
buttresses, as if by stealth, poured them cold and stilly upon the fretted 
arches, dark columns; and shadowy tombs ; and, by making its approach 
more, gradual, rendered the empire of the imagination more perfect. 
This light of the moon, if light it could be called, waxed more and more 
faint, and before the solemn tones of the bell had recorded midnight, 
the darkness_and all its wonders were complete. 
In the sequestration of that darkness, and aided by the shadowy 
things, it, brought forward, I took up a train of reflections accordant with 
‘he scene—or rather, I should say, with the situation—for scene, in the 
ordinary acceptation of the term, there was none. “ Why,” communed 
I with myself, «‘ should so much life die, so much beauty fall into cor- 
ruption, and so much greatness turn into nothing and oblivion ?—And 
why should they not—seeing that they make room for new life, new 
beauty, and new greatness, every way as warm, as lively, and as desirable 
as those which are displaced?” The latter question seemed to lean to- 
wards the affirmative; and death appeared in a more amiable aspect 
than I before had thought of. He was no longer the vindictive pursuer 
of life; asa bloodhound following his prey ; but the harbinger who pre- 
cedes it, prepares the way for it, and smoothes its approach. He was 
not the destroyer of existence ; but the friend who made the path of its 
coming—that swept away the ruins of the rubbish, to give room for the 
structure. He was not the sad .porter, who opened the gates by which 
living things are dismissed; but the mareschal who made way for them, 
and guided them to their places—the friend, without whose kindly inter- 
ference the number of those who tasted of the sweets of life must have 
been indeed limited. 
While I meditated thus, without any sensible proof of the reality of 
the world,around me, or even of my own existence, save the feeling of 
contact with the tomb, I began gradually to lose even that last and insig- 
nificant link. I cannot be sure that I was awake; neither will I take 
upon, me to say that I slept—for I had the clear perception and the 
undoubting conviction of the former state, joined to the intellectual 
abstraction of the latter; I was, as it were, a being both of this world 
and. of the next: I had the palpable conviction of the one, and the un- 
bounded and unclogged imagination of the other. I ceased to know that 
I was in Westminster Abbey; but I knew and felt that I was in a world 
which, while it bad all the fascination of fancy, had all the force of 
reality,—and of which memory could take as full and as faithful a re- 
cord, as if it had been attested by a thousand witnesses. I need not 
say that the Abbey, with all its garniture, was gone; for I was caught 
up; as it were, into the very desolation of the chaos—the workhouse of 
the occult powers of nature—where things have their beginning and 
their end, and where nought was to be descried but that uncompre- 
hended. material of which the world was at first made, and into which 
the world shall at last be resolved. Beneath, around, and above me, all 
»was alike—a dusky void, which became dim from its gloominess, in 
which there was no point whereby to find out direction, and no object 
‘on which to judge of distance. I tried to move—and though motion was 
every where dull and heavy, it was not more so in one direction than 
‘inanother.. I urged myself onward with all the speed I could, anxious 
