1832-37. EXTRACTS FROM DIARY. 23 



occurrence. I awoke, but this feeling of deep happiness 

 did not immediately disappear, not indeed till it had been 

 much the subject of reflection and analysis. 



" I have no remembrance of having such a dream before. 

 My dreams are for the most part, in health, ludicrous, in 

 disease, frightful ; but in no way resembling the dream in 

 question. It may be plausibly accounted for. On the 

 preceding evening I had been reading, with feelings of 

 great admiration, the ' Confessions of an Opium-Eater,' and 

 in addition en joying the conversation of a highly intellectual 

 and imaginative friend, and retired to bed under feelings of 

 great excitement, more especially my imagination called into 

 play ; and it may be supposed that such a state of mind 

 easily produced the effects in question, Le. the dream, 

 This would go to prove the truth of Dr. Macnish's theory 

 regarding dreams, that we dream all the night long, and 

 that the reason we do not recollect them is because memory 

 is not called into action. If that theory be correct, and I 

 think it is, what glorious visions I must have lost ! what en- 

 trancing pictures of seraphic beauty and unimaginable 

 glory 1 " 



On the next page is a morsel of Infirmary life, in writing 

 which he seems to have been interrupted, for it closes 

 abruptly in the middle of a sentence. Two pages have 

 been left blank for its continuation, bu,t the story was never 

 resumed. 



" January $th, 1836. I have this day had to perform 

 one of the most melancholy duties which it has fallen to my 

 lot for some time to perform, the burying of a stranger in a 

 foreign land, in the cold grave. 'Tis about two months 

 since I was struck, in going round one of the wards of the 

 Infirmary, by the handsome contour of one of the patients, 



