standing
they strike a note most full of harmony. Whatsoever is harmonically
composed, delights in harmony, which makes me much distrust the
symmetry of those heads which declaim against all church music. For
myself, not only from my obedience, but my particular genius, I do
embrace it: for even that vulgar and tavern music, which makes one man
merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion and a profound
contemplation of the First Composer; there is something in it of
divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an hieroglyphical and
shadowed lesson of the whole world and creatures of God; such a melody
to the ear as the whole world, well understood, would afford the
understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which
intellectually sounds in the ears of God. It unties the ligaments of my
frame, takes me to pieces, dilates me out of myself, and by degrees,
methinks, resolves me into heaven. I will not say, with Plato, the soul
is an harmony, but harmonical, and hath its nearest sympathy unto music;
thus some, whose temper of body agrees and humors the constitution of
their souls, are born poets, though indeed all are naturally inclined
unto rhythm.

There is surely a nearer apprehension of anything that delights us in
our dreams than in our waked senses: without this, I were unhappy; for
my awaked judgment discontents me, ever whispering unto me that I am
from my friend; but my friendly dreams in the night requite me, and make
me think I am within his arms. I thank God for my happy dreams, as I do
for my good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable
desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happiness; and surely
it is not a melancholy conceit to think we are all asleep in this world,
and that the conceits of this life are as mere dreams to those of the
next; as the phantasms of the night to the conceits of the day. There is
an equal delusion in both, and the one doth but seem to be the emblem or
picture of the other; we are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps,
and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul. It
is the ligation of sense, but the liberty of reason; and our waking
conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps. At my nativity my
ascendant was the watery sign of Scorpius; I was born in the planetary
hour of Saturn, and I think I have a piece of that leaden planet in me.
I am no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and gall