Page:The Literary Magnet 1828 vol 5.djvu/14

There is a dreamy, melancholy mood of thought into which the mind sometimes steals without any perceptible reason for it; a sort of voluntary trance, in which the spirit resigns its activity, but retains its consciousness, and floats passively up and down the stream of time and humanity. There is a luxury in this state of mind, of which every one has tasted more or less. To the busy and active, it is the spirit's bed of down; to the lonely, deep-thinking, and imaginative man, it is the passage to scenes of inconceivable loveliness,—shadowy, and indistinct, and dim, but dropping with the rich dews of a most perfect harmony. But the awakening from this dream is painful in proportion to the intensity of its impressions. We feel the walls of mortality closing round us with a sensation of suffering; the realities and circumstances of life arrange themselves as barriers to our enchanted palace; the past, with its mellowed sacred beauty, is lost under the glare of day; and we hear a thousand voices telling us, that, while our hearts seemed to see their holiest remembrances become instinct with life and form, they were but in a vain and unprofitable dream.

The last night of the old year found me in the mood I have been describing, but there was pain and regret mixed up with the sensations it produced; visions floated around me that had but just escaped from my grasp, and the unreal had been too lately a part of the present and the palpable to let me enjoy it in reverie. We can look steadily and calmly back on the far off waves of life; but we shrink from watching them, when they are still bearing the wrecks of our lives and enjoyments. I felt that it would be wiser to escape from my lonely thoughts; and, seeing the clear bright moonlight glittering through my window, I buttoned myself up, and sallied out for a ramble. I had not, however, gone far, when a dense fog arose, my path became hardly discernible, and the thick heavy dew dripped off my hat as in a steady shower of rain. There was no alternative, but either to stay out and get unimaginably wet, or return back to my solitary study, to neither of which I could reconcile myself; the one threatening me, in plain