that imperial forgetter of his dreams,
that we should need a seer to remind us of the form of them. They seem
to us to have as much significance as our waking concerns; or rather
to import us more nearly, as more nearly we approach by years to the
shadowy world whither we are hastening. We have shaken hands with the
world's business; we have done with it; we have discharged ourselves
of it.

Why should we get up? We have neither suit to solicit, nor affairs to
manage. The drama has shut in upon us at the fourth act. We have
nothing here to expect but in a short time a sick-bed and a dismissal.
We delight to anticipate death by such shadows as night affords. We
are already half acquainted with ghosts. We were never much in the
world. Disappointment early struck a dark veil between us and its
dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed gray before our hairs. The
mighty changes of the world already appear as but the vain stuff out
of which dramas are composed. We have asked no more of life than what
the mimic images in playhouses present us with. Even those types have
waxed fainter. Our clock appears to have struck. We are superannuated.
In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, we contract politic alliances
with shadows. It is good to have friends at court. The abstracted
media of dreams seem no ill introduction to that spiritual presence,
upon which, in no long time, we expect to be thrown. We are trying to
know a little of the usages of that colony; to learn the language, and
the faces we shall meet with there, that we may be the less awkward at
our first coming among them. We willingly call a fantom our fellow, as
knowing we shall soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore we
cherish dreams. We try to spell in them the alphabet of the invisible
world, and think we know already how it shall be with us. Those
uncouth shapes, which, while we clung to flesh and blood, affrighted
us, have become familiar. We feel attached into their meager essences,
and have given the hand of half-way approach to incorporeal being. We
once thought life to be something, but it has unaccountably fallen
from us before its time. Therefore we choose to dally with visions.
The sun has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why should we get up?

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 21: From the "Essays of Elia."]

[Footnote 22: From the "Essays of Elia."]

[Footnote 23: From the "Essays of Elia."]

[Footnote 24: From the "Essays of Elia."]

WILLIAM HA