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310

LIKE THEM THAT DREAM.

Mess Lethierry, who could scarcely believe his eyes: "Give me your word that I am not crazy. Assure me of that. What a revolution! I pinched myself to be certain I was not dreaming." Smollett's hero (by Sir Archibald Alison in one memorable passage dubbed a knight) regards the letter which announces him wealthy as a mere illusion of the brain, and a continuation of the reverie in which he had been engaged. He reads it ten times over, without being persuaded that he is actually awake; rubs his eyes and shakes his head, to rid himself of the drowsy vapours that surround him; hems thrice with great vociferation, snaps his fingers, tweaks his nose, starts up from his bed, and opening the casement, takes a survey of the well-known objects on each side of his habitation; and as everything seems congruous and connected, he can but come to the conclusion, "Sure, this is the most distinct dream that ever sleep produced." Twice at least in the physiological romance of Elsie Venner is the hero, Bernard, at a loss to decide whether he be dreaming or waking: once, after the escape from the deadly crotalus, in that strange adventure on The Mountain; and next, after his stunned escape from Dick Venner's murderous slip-knot: "It was all a dream to him as yet. He remembered the horseman riding at him, and his firing the pistol; but whether he was alive, and these walls around him belonged to the village of Rockland, or whether he had passed the dark river, and was in a suburb of the New Jerusalem, he could not as yet have told." How much Mr. Dickens made of Affery Flintwinch's perplexities between dreaming and waking, readers of Little Dorrit may perhaps remember, in repeated instances, elaborately worked out. If any readers of his can also, by any admissible hypothesis, at this time of day, have been (in their time) readers also of Mrs. Brunton's Discipline, they may recall the heroine's note of exultation at getting clear of the " asylum"; how confident her persuasion that never did harp and viol delight the ear like the sound of the heavy gate which closed upon her departing steps-while she paused for a moment to ask herself if all was not a dream, then leant her forehead against the threshold,

LIKE THEM THAT DREAM.

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and wept the thanksgiving she could not utter. In the last chapter, too, when she and Graham stand together beside the calm lake, "How often, both sleeping and awake, have I dreamt of this!—and even now, I can scarcely believe that it is not all a dream," he says. George Geith has the same incredulity over the letter that has made a free man of him: he covers his face with his hands, and sits with his eyes shut, to assure himself, on opening them again, that he has not been dreaming; and we are made to note his joy when, next morning, he satisfies himself by another perusal of his letter that the liberty which had come to him last night was not a dream. Or glance at Silas Marner's discovery of the sleeping child on his floor-a round, fair thing, with soft yellow rings all over its head: could this be his little sister come back to him in a dream-his little sister whom he had carried about in his arms for a year before she died, when he, the Weaver of Raveloe, was a small boy without shoes or stockings? "That was the first thought that darted across Silas's blank wonderment-Was it a dream?" The weaver's epileptic experiences may suggest a sort of parallel in the hero of the Princess. For Mr. Tennyson's readers will easily remember the case of his Prince, who has "weird seizures, Heaven knows what," so that on a sudden in the midst of men and day, and while he walks and talks as heretofore, he seems to move among a world of ghosts, and feel himself the shadow of a dream. When he is thrust out at the gates, he and his companion, by order of the resentful Princess, they cross the street and gain a petty mound beyond it, whence they see the lights and hear the voices murmuring.

66

While I listen'd, came

On a sudden the weird seizure and the doubt:
I seem'd to move among a world of ghosts;

The Princess with her monstrous woman-guard,
The jest and earnest working side by side,
The cataract and the tumult and the kings
Were shadows; and the long fantastic night
With all its doings had and had not been,
And all things were and were not."

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'ABOUT THIRTY YEARS OF AGE?

Once more, and only this once. The discrowned king, Robert of Sicily, in the metrical legend, thrust from the hall as an impostor, and decked with cap and bells, to the tune of the tittering of pages and the boisterous laughter of the menat-arms,-

"Next morning, waking with the day's first beam,

He said within himself, 'It was a dream!'
But the straw rustled as he turn'd his head,
There were the cap and bells beside his bed;
It was no dream; the world he loved so much
Had turn'd to dust and ashes at his touch!"

'ABOUT THIRTY YEARS OF AGE?

ST. LUKE iii. 23.

OT until He "began to be about thirty years of age," did

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Jesus of Nazareth begin His public career. Even a few years beyond thirty may be comprised in the indefinite expression; some chronologists insist that they must be. About thirty years of age, is a term expressive of the departure of youth.

It has been objected to that scene in Mr. Longfellow's Divine Tragedy which dramatizes the marriage at Cana in Galilee, that youthfulness is assigned to the principal figure, in disregard of convention and chronology. "Who is that youth with the dark azure eyes?" asks the governor of the feast. Elsewhere, it is further objected to the same work, a Pharisee denominates Him "a stripling without learning," while another notes that—

"Never have I seen so young a man
Sit in the teacher's seat,"-

expressions characterized as incompatible alike with reading one's Bible and with any acquaintance with the world's masterpieces of pictorial art.

The author of the New Phado considers thirty years of age the epoch for the departure of youth; by which he does not, of

'ABOUT THIRTY YEARS OF AGE?

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course, intend to signify incipient decay, our frames being as young as they were five years before, while the mind has been ripening; by youth he means the growing and progressive season, the departure of it being visible only inasmuch as we have become, as it were, fixed and stationary. The qualities that peculiarly belong to youth-its "quick thronging fancies," its exuberance of energy and feeling, cease, by his reckoning, to be our distinctions at thirty. We are then still young, but no longer youthful. A distinguished American author writes a chapter about a birthday; and of a woman who that day is fiveand-thirty years old, we read that, "To-day she turned her back upon her youth; it was all behind her now; she set her face, of compulsion, downward over the hill of life; she had passed the crest; the waters flowed the other way; they came no longer, springing from sweet fountains, to meet her; they ran from, and outran her." Maynard, in the play, speaks of himself as almost thirty-"warning thirty." Warning thirty? repeats his companion, half-mockingly, half inquiringly. The other explains, ""Tis half the journey, Tom. Depend on't, after thirty, 'tis time to count the milestones." At the age of thirty, according to Lord Lytton, the characters of most men pass through a revolution: the common pleasures of the world have been tasted to the full, and begin to pall; we have reduced to the sober test of reality the visions of youth; we no longer chase frivolities or hope for chimæras; and we may now come with better success than Rasselas to the Choice of Life. Chamfort quotes a friend who moralized to him on the alleged fact, that, in France, men are more honest in youth and up to thirty years of age, than after that period; the reason he assigns being that not until a man is turned of thirty is he d'étrompé, or comes to see that the evils under which his country groans are irremediable. Up to that time a man is compared to a dog that defends his master's dinner against other dogs; after it, he is the same dog, taking his share with the rest. Sainte-Beuve expatiates on the existence within us of une certaine fleur de sentiments, a certain rêverie première, which soon exhales amid the prosaic realism of life, and expires amid the occupations of this worky

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DEPARTURE OF YOUTH.

day world. In three-fourths of us, he affirms, there is a poet that dies young, while the man survives. Millevoye he proposes as the impersonated type of this young poet who is not to have length of days, and who dies at thirty or sooner in each one of us.*

A north-country divine shrewdly comments on the custom men have of postponing, year after year, the point at which people cease to be young; and on the pleasure we have in finding people talk of men above thirty as young men ; on his own remembered gratitude, indeed, to Mr. Dickens, for describing Tom Pinch, in an advertisement for insertion in the morning papers, as "a respectable young man, aged thirty-five." Sir Robert Peel is cited as describing the late Lord Derby at forty-five, as a man "in the buoyancy of youth "—to the secret elation of all forty-fivers who read the words. And Lord Lytton is cited for his practice, as he himself grew older, of making the heroes of his novels grow older pari passu; his earliest heroes being lads of twenty; his latest, always sentimental men of fifty. If unsuccessful, or over-burdened, overdriven, lightly esteemed, with much depending upon him, and little aid or sympathy, a man may, as an essay on Growing Old reminds us, feel old at thirty-five; whereas, if there be still a house where he is one of "the boys"-if he be living among his kindred and those who have grown up along with him; if he be still unmarried; if he have not lived in many different places, or in any place very far away; if he have not known many different modes of life, or worked in many different kinds of work then at thirty-five he may feel very young. Temperaments strangely vary. A maxim-monger of the Rochefoucauld school has a reflection to this effect: We talk much of the madcap ways of twenty years, la folie de vingt ans; but what about those of five-and-thirty, which are equally pronounced and equally common? Alceste after Werther. Rousseau "n'a

* It was in reference to this passage that Alfred de Musset addressed to Sainte-Beuve what the latter, in his pleasure and pride, calls some trèsaimables vers. See the Pensées d'Août.

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