unutterable abortions, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

Some slight abstraction I thus attempt of my Oriental dreams, which
filled me always with such amazement at the monstrous scenery, that
horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner or
later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and
left me, not so much in terror, as in hatred and abomination of what I
saw. Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless
incarceration, brooded a killing sense of eternity and infinity. Into
these dreams only it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any
circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral
and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or
snakes, or crocodiles, especially the last. The curst crocodile became
to me the object of more horror than all the rest. I was compelled to
live with him, and (as was always the case in my dreams) for
centuries. Sometimes I escaped, and found myself in Chinese houses.
All the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon became instinct with
life; the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes,
looked out at me, multiplied into ten thousand repetitions; and I
stood loathing and fascinated. So often did this hideous reptile haunt
my dreams, that many times the very same dream was broken up in the
very same way. I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear everything
when I am sleeping), and instantly I awake; it was broad noon, and my
children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside, come to show me
their colored shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them drest for
going out. No experience was so awful to me, and at the same time so
pathetic, as this abrupt translation from the darkness of the infinite
to the gaudy summer air of highest noon, and from the unutterable
abortions of mis-created gigantic vermin to the sight of infancy and
innocent human natures.

_June 1819._--I have had occasion to remark, at various periods of my
life, that the deaths of those whom we love, and, indeed, the
contemplation of death generally, is (_coeteris paribus_) more
affecting in summer than in any other season of the year. And the
reasons are these three, I think: first, that the visible heavens in
summer appear far higher, more distant, and (if such a solecism may
be excused) more infinite; the clouds by which chiefly the eye
expounds the distance of the blue pavilion stretched over our heads