of wine, which must have been offered to a
portion of his mind quite early in the dream. Then, too, from whence come
the images of the dream? Not always, I was soon persuaded, from the
memory, perhaps never in trance or sleep. One man, who certainly thought
that Eve's apple was the sort that you got from the greengrocer, and as
certainly never doubted its story's literal truth, said, when I used some
symbol to send him to Eden, that he saw a walled garden on the top of a
high mountain, and in the middle of it a tree with great birds in the
branches, and fruit out of which, if you held a fruit to your ear, came
the sound of fighting. I had not at the time read Dante's _Purgatorio_,
and it caused me some trouble to verify the mountain garden, and, from
some passage in the Zohar, the great birds among the boughs; while a young
girl, on being sent to the same garden, heard "the music of heaven" from a
tree, and on listening with her ear against the trunk, found that it was
made by the "continual clashing of swords." Whence came that fine thought
of music-making swords, that image of the garden, and many like images and
thoughts? I had as yet no clear answer, but knew myself face to face with
the Anima Mundi described by Platonic philosophers, and more especially in
modern times by Henry More, which has a memory independent of individual
memories, though they constantly enrich it with their images and their
thoughts.

III

At Sligo we walked twice every day, once after lunch and once after
dinner, to the same gate on the road to Knocknarea; and at Rosses Point,
to the same rock upon the shore; and as we walked we exchanged those
thoughts that never rise before me now without bringing some sight of
mountain or of shore. Considering that Mary Battle received our thoughts
in sleep, though coarsened or turned to caricature, do not the thoughts of
the scholar or the hermit, though they speak no word, or something of
their shape and impulse, pass into the general mind? Does not the emotion
of some woman of fashion, caught in the subtle torture of self-analysing
passion, pass down, although she speak no word, to Joan with her Pot, Jill
with her Pail and, it may be, with one knows not what nightmare melancholy
to Tom the Fool?

Seeing that a vision could divide itself in divers complementary portions,
might not the thought of philosopher or poet or mathematician depend at
every moment of its progress upon some complementary thou