DEMONOLOGY.

NIGHT-DREAMS trace on Memory's wall Shadows of the thoughts of day,

And thy fortunes as they fall

The bias of thy will betray.

In the chamber, on the stairs,

Lurking dumb,

Go and come Lemurs and Lars.

THE name Demonology covers dreams, omens, coincidences, luck, sortilege, magic and other experiences which shun rather than court inquiry, and deserve notice chiefly because every man has usually in a lifetime two or three hints in this kind which are specially impressive to him. They also shed light on our structure.

The witchcraft of sleep divides with truth the empire of our lives. This soft enchantress visits two children lying locked in each other's arms, and carries them asunder by wide spaces of land and sea, and wide intervals of time:

"There lies a sleeping city, God of dreams!
What an unreal and fantastic world

Within the sweep of yon encircling wall

How many a large creation of the night,

Wide wilderness and mountain, rock and sea,

Peopled with busy, transitory groups,

Finds room to rise, and never feels the crowd."

'Tis superfluous to think of the dreams of multitudes, the astonishment remains that one should dream; that we should resign so quietly this deifying Reason, and

1 From the course of lectures on "Human Life," read in Boston, 1839-40. Published in the North American Review, 1877.

become the theatre of delirious shows, wherein time, space, persons, cities, animals, should dance before us in merry and mad confusion; a delicate creation outdoing the prime and flower of actual nature, antic comedy alternating with horrid pictures. Sometimes the forgotten companions of childhood reappear:

"They come, in dim procession led,

The cold, the faithless, and the dead,
As warm each hand, each brow as gay,
As if they parted yesterday: "

or we seem busied for hours and days in peregrinations
over seas and lands, in earnest dialogues, strenuous ac-
tions for nothings and absurdities, cheated by spectral
jokes and waking suddenly with ghastly laughter, to be
rebuked by the cold, lonely, silent midnight, and to rake
with confusion in memory among the gibbering nonsense
to find the motive of this contemptible cachinnation.
Dreams are jealous of being remembered; they dissi-
pate instantly and angrily if you try to hold them.
When newly awaked from lively dreams, we are so
near them, still agitated by them, still in their sphere,
give us one syllable, one feature, one hint, and we should
repossess the whole; hours of this strange entertainment
would come trooping back to us; but we cannot get our
hand on the first link or fibre, and the whole is lost.
There is a strange wilfulness in the speed with which it.
disperses and baffles our grasp.

A dislocation seems to be the foremost trait of dreams. A painful imperfection almost always attends them. The fairest forms, the most noble and excellent persons, arc deformed by some pitiful and insane circumstance. The very landscape and scenery in a dream seem not to fit us, but like a coat or cloak of some other person to

overlap and encumber the wearer; so is the ground, the road, the house, in dreams, too long or too short, and if it served no other purpose would show us how accurately nature fits man awake.

There is one memory of waking and another of sleep. In our dreams the same scenes and fancies are many times associated, and that too, it would seem, for years. In sleep one shall travel certain roads in stage-coaches or gigs, which he recognizes as familiar, and has dreamed that ride a dozen times; or shall walk alone in familiar fields and meadows, which road or which meadow in waking hours he never looked upon. This feature of dreams deserves the more attention from its singular resemblance to that obscure yet startling experience which almost every person confesses in daylight, that particular passages of conversation and action have occurred to him in the same order before, whether dreaming or waking; a suspicion that they have been with precisely these persons in precisely this room, and heard precisely this dialogue, at some former hour, they know not when.

Animals have been called "the dreams of nature." Perhaps for a conception of their consciousness we may go to our own dreams. In a dream we have the instinctive obedience, the same torpidity of the highest power, the same unsurprised assent to the monstrous as these metamorphosed men exhibit. Our thoughts in a stable or in a menagerie, on the other hand, may well remind us of our dreams. What compassion do these imprisoning forms awaken! You may catch the glance of a dog sometimes which lays a kind of claim to sympathy and brotherhood. What! somewhat of me down there? Does he know it? Can he too, as I, go out of himself, see himself, perceive relations? We fear lest the poor