Can it be that that last waking also was in the dream? that I am still in the chamber¹ of death, asleep and dreaming, not yet ripe enough to wake? Or can it be that I did not go to sleep outright² and heartily³, and so have come awake too soon? If that waking was itself but a dream, surely it was a dream of a better waking yet to come, and I have not been the sport of a false vision! Such a dream must have yet lovelier truth at the heart of its dreaming!

 

In moments of doubt I cry,

 

“Could God Himself create such lovely things as I dreamed?”

 

“Whence then came thy dream?” answers Hope.

 

“Out of my dark self, into the light of my consciousness.”

 

“But whence first into thy dark self?” rejoins Hope.

 

“My brain was its mother, and the fever in my blood its father.”

 

“Say rather,” suggests Hope, “thy brain was the violin whence it issued, and the fever in thy blood the bow that drew it forth⁴.—But who made the violin? and who guided the bow across its strings⁵? Say rather, again—who set the song birds each on its bough⁶ in the tree of life, and startled each in its order from its perch⁷? Whence came the fantasia? and whence the life that danced thereto? Didst THOU say, in the dark of thy own unconscious self, ‘Let beauty be; let truth seem!’ and straightway beauty was, and truth but seemed?”

 

Man dreams and desires; God broods and wills and quickens.

 

When a man dreams his own dream, he is the sport of his dream; when Another gives it him, that Other is able to fulfil it.

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