pite of wrath,
doubt, and anxiety, he sank into slumber.

It is seldom that sleep, after such violent agitation, is either sound
or refreshing. Lovel's was disturbed by a thousand baseless and confused
visions. He was a bird--he was a fish--or he flew like the one, and swam
like the other,--qualities which would have been very essential to his
safety a few hours before. Then Miss Wardour was a syren, or a bird of
Paradise; her father a triton, or a sea-gull; and Oldbuck alternately
a porpoise and a cormorant. These agreeable imaginations were varied by
all the usual vagaries of a feverish dream;--the air refused to bear the
visionary, the water seemed to burn him--the rocks felt like down pillows
as he was dashed against them--whatever he undertook, failed in some
strange and unexpected manner--and whatever attracted his attention,
underwent, as he attempted to investigate it, some wild and wonderful
metamorphosis, while his mind continued all the while in some degree
conscious of the delusion, from which it in vain struggled to free
itself by awaking;--feverish symptoms all, with which those who are
haunted by the night-hag, whom the learned call Ephialtes, are but too
well acquainted. At length these crude phantasmata arranged themselves
into something more regular, if indeed the imagination of Lovel, after
he awoke (for it was by no means the faculty in which his mind was least
rich), did not gradually, insensibly, and unintentionally, arrange in
better order the scene of which his sleep presented, it may be, a less
distinct outline. Or it is possible that his feverish agitation may have
assisted him in forming the vision.

Leaving this discussion to the learned, we will say, that after a
succession of wild images, such as we have above described, our hero,
for such we must acknowledge him, so far regained a consciousness of
locality as to remember where he was, and the whole furniture of the
Green Chamber was depicted to his slumbering eye. And here, once more,
let me protest, that if there should be so much old-fashioned faith
left among this shrewd and sceptical generation, as to suppose that
what follows was an impression conveyed rather by the eye than by the
imagination, I do not impugn their doctrine. He was, then, or imagined
himself, broad awake in the Green Chamber, gazing upon the flickering
and occasional flame which the unconsumed remnants of the faggots sent
forth, as, one by one, they fell down upon t