Dreams are but interludes which fancy makes;
When monarch reason sleeps, this mimic wakes:
Compounds a medley of disjointed things,
A mob of cobblers, and a court of kings:
Light fumes are merry, grosser fumes are sad;
Both are the reasonable soul run mad:
And many monstrous forms in sleep we see,
That neither were, nor arc, nor e'er can be.
Sometimes forgotten things long cast behind
Rush forward in the brain, and come to mind.
The nurse's legends are for truths received,
And the man dreams but what the boy believed.

Dryden.

But dreams full oft are found of real events
The forms and shadows.

Joanna Baillie's Ethwald.

While o'er my limbs sleep's soft dominion spread,
What though my soul fantastic measures trod
O'er fairy fields; or mourn'd along the gloom
Of pathless woods; or down the craggy steep
Huri'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled
pool;

Or scal'd the cliff, or danc'd on hollow winds,
With antic shapes, wild natives of the brain?
Her ceaseless flight, though devious, speaks her

nature

He sleeps, if it be sleep; this starting trance,
Whose feverish tossings and deep mutter'd groans
Do prove the soul shares not the body's rest-
How the lip works, how the bare teeth do grind,
And beaded drops course down his writhen brow!
Maturin's Bertram

Lightly he dreamt as youth will dream,
Of sport by thicket, or by stream,
Of hawk, of hound, of ring, of glove,
Or lighter yet-of lady's love.

Scott's Marmion.

Our waking dreams are fatal: how I dreamt,
Of things impossible! (could sleep do more?)
Of joys perpetual in perpetual change!
Of stable pleasures on the tossing wave!
Eternal sunshine in the storms of life!
How richly were my noon-tide trances hung
With gorgeous tapestries of pictur'd joys!
Joy behind joy, in endless perspective!
Till at death's toll, whose restless iron tongue
Calls daily for his millions at a meal,
Starting I woke, and found myself undone.

Young.

Dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past, they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power-
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not what they
will,

And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanish'd shadows-Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? what are they?
Creations of the mind? the mind can make
Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
Byron's Dream

O Spirit Land! thou land of dreams!
A world thou art of mysterious gleams,
Of startling voices and sounds of strife,
A world of the dead in the hues of life.
Mrs. Hemans's Poems

I walk with sweet friends in the sunset glow;
I listen to music of long ago;
But one thought, like an omen, breathes faint
through the lay,-

Of subtler essence than the trodden clod; -
For human weal, heaven husbands all events,
Dull sleep instructs, nor sport vain dreams in vain. "It is but a dream; it will melt away."

Young.

Mrs. Heman's Poems

No jocund health, that Denmark drinks to-day,
But the great cannon to the clouds shall tell;
And the king's rouse the heaven shall bruit again,
Re-speaking earthly thunder.

Shaks. Hamlet.

Give me a bowl of wine :

In this I bury all unkindness, Cassius.

Give me a bowl of wine:

I have not that alacrity of spirit,
Nor cheer of mind, that I was wont to have.
Shaks. Richard III.

Drunkenness that's a most gentleman-like
Sin, it scorns to be beholden; for what it
Receives in a man's house, it commonly
Leaves again at his door.

Now,

As with new wine intoxicated both,
They swim in mirth, and fancy that they feel
Divinity within them breeding wings
Wherewith to scorn the earth.

Milton's Paradise Lost.
Man, with raging drink inflam'd,
Shaks. Julius Cæsar. Is far more savage and untam'd;
Supplies his loss of wit and sense
With barb'rousness and insolence;
Believes himself, the less he's able,
The more heroic, and formidable;
Lays by his reason in his bowls,
As Turks are said to do their souls,
Until it has so often been
Shut out of its lodgings, and let in,
At length it never can attain
To find the right way back again;
Drinks all his time away, and prunes
The end of's life as vignerons
Cut short the branches of a vine,
To make it bear more plenty o' wine;
And that which nature did intend
T enlarge his life, perverts its end.

Cupid's Whirligig.

Fly drunkenness, whose vile incontinence
Takes both away the reason and the sense:
Till with Circæan cups thy mind possest
Leaves to be man, and wholly turns a beast.
Think while thou swallow'st the capacious bowl,
Thou let'st in seas to sack and drown thy soul.
That hell is open, to remembrance call,
And think how subject drunkards are to fall.
Consider how it soon destroys the grace
Of human shape, spoiling the beauteous face:
Puffing the cheeks, blearing the curious eye,
Studding the face with vicious heraldry.
What pearls and rubies does the wine disclose,
Making the purse poor to enrich the nose!
How does it nurse disease, infect the heart,
Drawing some sickness into every part!

Randolph.

Butler's Hudibras.

Thus as they swim in mutual swill, the talk,
Vociferous at once from twenty tongues,
Reels fast from theme to theme; from horses,
hounds,

To church or mistress, politics or ghost,
In endless mazes, intricate, perplex'd.

Thomson's Seasons.
Confused above,

Glasses and bottles, pipes and gazetteers,
As if the table even itself was drunk,
Lie a wet broken scene; and wide, below,
Is heap'd the social slaughter: where astride,
The lubber power in filthy triumph sits,
Slumb'rous, inclining still from side to side,
And steeps them drench'd in potent sleep till morn.
Perhaps some doctor, of tremendous paunch,
Awful and deep, a black abyss of drink,
Outlives them all, and from his bury'd flock
Retiring full of rumination sad,

Laments the weakness of these latter times.
Thomson's Seasons.
What dext'rous thousands just within the goal
Of wild debauch direct their nightly course!
Perhaps no sickly qualms bedim their days,
No morning admonitions shock the head.
But ah! what woes remain! life rolls apace,
And that incurable disease-old age,
In youthful bodies more severely felt,
More sternly active, shakes their blasted prime.
Armstrong's Art of Preserving Health

Your words have took such pains, as if they labour'd
To bring manslaughter into form, set quarrelling
Upon the head of valour; which, indeed,
Is valour misbegot, and came into the world
When sects and factions were but newly born:
He's truly valiant, that can wisely suffer
The worst that man can breathe; and make his Humble toil and heavenward duty -