hat_ was done by the
actors in the drama; but to recall you to your own lurking
thoughts--hidden for the moment or imperfectly developed, and to place
before you, in immediate connexion with groups vanishing too quickly for
any effort of meditation on your own part, such commentaries, prophetic
or looking back, pointing the moral or deciphering the mystery,
justifying Providence, or mitigating the fierceness of anguish, as would
or might have occurred to your own meditative heart--had only time been
allowed for its motions.

The Interpreter is anchored and stationary in my dreams; but great
storms and driving mists cause him to fluctuate uncertainly, or even to
retire altogether, like his gloomy counterpart the shy Phantom of the
Brocken--and to assume new features or strange features, as in dreams
always there is a power not contented with reproduction, but which
absolutely creates or transforms. This dark being the reader will see
again in a further stage of my opium experience; and I warn him that he
will not always be found sitting inside my dreams, but at tines outside,
and in open daylight.

FINALE TO PART I.--SAVANNAH-LA-MAR.

God smote Savannah-la-Mar, and in one night, by earthquake, removed her,
with all her towers standing and population sleeping, from the steadfast
foundations of the shore to the coral floors of ocean. And God
said--"Pompeii did I bury and conceal from men through seventeen
centuries: this city I will bury, but not conceal. She shall be a
monument to men of my mysterious anger; set in azure light through
generations to come: for I will enshrine her in a crystal dome of my
tropic seas." This city, therefore, like a mighty galleon with all her
apparel mounted, streamers flying, and tackling perfect, seems floating
along the noiseless depths of ocean: and oftentimes in glassy calms,
through the translucid atmosphere of water that now stretches like an
air-woven awning above the silent encampment, mariners from every clime
look down into her courts and terraces, count her gates, and number the
spires of her churches. She is one ample cemetery, and _has_ been for
many a year; but in the mighty calms that brood for weeks over tropic
latitudes, she fascinates the eye with a _Fata-Morgana_ revelation, as
of human life still subsisting in submarine asylums sacred from the
storms that torment our upper air.

Thither, lured by the loveliness of cerulean depths, by the peace of
human dwellings pr