one else's, and for that matter (in the state of the sugar
trade) is not worth anything to anybody. I do not say
that these revolutions are likely; only no man can deny
that they are possible; and the past, on the other hand,
is lost for ever: our old days and deeds, our old selves,
too, and the very world in which these scenes were
acted, all brought down to the same faint residuum as
a last night's dream, to some incontinuous images, and
an echo in the chambers of the brain. Not an hour,
not a mood, not a glance of the eye, can we revoke;
it is all gone, past conjuring. And yet conceive us
robbed of it, conceive that little thread of memory that
we trail behind us broken at the pocket's edge; and in
what naked nullity should we be left! for we only guide
ourselves, and only know ourselves, by these air-painted
pictures of the past.

Upon these grounds, there are some among us who
claim to have lived longer and more richly than their
neighbours; when they lay asleep they claim they were
still active; and among the treasures of memory that
all men review for their amusement, these count in no
second place the harvests of their dreams. There is one
of this kind whom I have in my eye, and whose case is
perhaps unusual enough to be described. He was from
a child an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer. When
he had a touch of fever at night, and the room swelled
and shrank, and his clothes, hanging on a nail, now
loomed up instant to the bigness of a church, and now
drew away into a horror of infinite distance and infinite
littleness, the poor soul was very well aware of what
must follow, and struggled hard against the approaches
of that slumber which was the beginning of sorrows.

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