Daydreaming

“ I refer to day-dreaming—not going to sleep by day, but dreaming with your eyes open. Of course, if deeply indulged in, this enervates the brain, but, to an over-worked or tired one, it is refreshing. It is like sleep without the stifling embrace of the blankets and the feather-bed. It is like dreaming without danger of a sudden apparition, or that spell-bound helplessness, which is the paralysis of dream life, when you cannot stir, and yet feel the breath of the unseen terror behind you. ”

“ With naught to wake one sigh,
Except the wish that all we love
Were at this moment nigh,—
It seems as if life's brilliant sun
Had stopt in full career,
To make this hour its brightest one,
And rest in radiance here.
MIND NOT THO' DAYLIGHT. Mind not tho' daylight around us is breaking,—
Who'd think now of sleeping when morn's but just waking?
Sound the merry viol, and daylight or not,
Be all for one hour in the gay dance forgot.
See young Aurora up heaven's hill advancing,
Tho' fresh from her pillow, even she too is dancing:
While thus all creation, earth, heaven, and sea. ”

“ Old hopes, like dead leaves, choke the difficult way;
Dark pinions fold dank round the soul, and it hears:
“It is night, it is night, it has never been day;
Thou hast dreamed of the day, of the rose of delight;
It was always dead leaves and the heart of the night.
Drink deep then, and rest, O thou foolish wayfarer,
For night, like a chalice, holds sleep in her hands.”
II Then you drain the dark cup, and, half-drugged as you lie
In the arms of despair that is masked as delight,
You thrill to the rush of white wings, and you hear:
“It is day, it is day, it has never been night! ”

“ Now, I mean to say that this day-dreaming is sometimes desirable and healthy. We thus occasionally come across thoughts which we should never start by deliberate hunting. We air the mind; we get out of the little world in which we commonly move, and go back to it refreshed.
Day-dreaming is all very well, now and then, on a holiday; but a woman who gushes with moonshine and romance is seldom a good judge of butcher’s meat, or a skilful interpreter of accounts ”

“ Vague, indistinct to ourselves, unbounded by hope or remembrance.
Yet we knew the beautiful night, as it grew from the evening:
Far beneath us and far above us the vault of the heavens
Glittered and darkened; and now the moon, that had haunted the daylight
Thin and pallid, dimmed the stars with her fulness of splendor,
And over all the lagoons fell the silvery rain of the moonbeams,
As in the song the young girls sang while their gondolas passed us,––
Sang in the joy of love, or youth’s desire of loving. ”

“ Under the eye of the sun the fluid elements of character are supplied; but the final edification takes place beneath the stars. Awake, we think, feel, act; sleeping, we become. Day feeds our consciousness; night, out of those stores which action has accumulated, nourishes the vital unconsciousness, the pure unit of the man. During sleep, the valid and serviceable experience of the day is drawn inward, wrought upon by spiritual catalysis, transmitted into conviction, sentiment, character, life, and made part of that which is to attract and assimilate all subsequent experience. ”

“ Nothing escapes, nothing is free.”
52
Clear Evening
The crescent moon is large enough to linger
A little while after the twilight goes,
This moist midsummer night the garden perfumes
Are earth and apple, dewy pine and rose.
Over my head four new-cut stars are glinting
And the inevitable night draws on;
I am alone, the old terror takes me,
Evenings will come like this when I am gone;
Evenings on evenings, years on years forever—
Be taut, my spirit, close upon and keep
The scent, the brooding chill, the gliding fire-fly,
A poem learned before I fall asleep. ”

“ It seems made for those light and whirling visions--not unmingled with thanks and praise--which drive past the dreamy imagination like motes in the sunshine, partaking still, in a degree, of sleep, and having all its soft indistinctness, without losing the brightness of waking perception: thoughts, hopes, and fancies, that glitter as they go, succeeded each minute by clearer and more brilliant things, till the whole, at length, form themselves into the sterner realities of noonday life. ”

“ I have been dreaming all a summer day:
Shall I go dreaming so until Life's light
Fades in Death's dusk, and all my days are spent?
Ah, what am I the dreamer but a dream !
The day is fading and the dusk is cold. ”

“ Your splendid eyes, so full of clouds, wherein a shadow tries
To overcome the flame that melts into the world of grey,
As coming suns dissolve the dark that veils the edge of day.
Cool drifts the air at dawn of day, cool lies the sleeping dew,
But all my heart is burning, for it woke from dreams of you;
And O! these longing eyes of mine look out and only see
A dying night, a waking day, and calm on all but me. ”

“ Remember me at early day,
Or when the evening shadows haste.
When high the pensive moon appears,
And night, with all her starry train,
Gives rest to human hopes and fears,
Remember I alone complain. ”

“ That was a dream of the mysterious night; but now we are broad awake—and see no emblematical phantoms, but the mere sights of the common day. But sufficient for the day is the beauty thereof—and it inspires us with affection for all beneath the skies. Will the whole world, then, promise henceforth to love us?—and we promise henceforth to love the whole world. ”

“ The day passed; night wrapped the earth in darkness; bird, beast, and human creatures rested in sleep, save where the solitary lamp burned dimly in the sick-room or the aching heart forbade the eyes to slumber. ”

“ With last night’s dream and last night’s dew.
Yes, they are gone; alas! each one of them;
Departed—every mother’s son of them.
Yet often, at the close of day,
When thoughts are winged and wandering, they
Come with the memory of the past,
Like sunset clouds along the mind,
Reflecting, as they’re flitting fast
In their wild hues of shade and light,
All that was beautiful and bright
In golden moments left behind. ”

“ Cold through the chill dark swings the sleeping world,
Sense-heavy, dreaming dully of clear day.
No moon, no stars, no sound of wind or seas:
Wearily sleeping in immense unease,
Dreams, dreams the world of day. ”

“ Such a night was it, as you would select for a stroll in company with the being—the one and only being—who, by the mysterious dictation of Nature, has entwined herself around your heart—a night upon which you feel a wayward longing to have white arms entwined around your neck, and bright eyes before your face, with that voluptuous gleaming that can only be felt to perfection under the mystic light of the moon. ”

“ The morning for thought, the afternoon for recreation, the evening for company, the night for rest. Having drank of immortality all night, the genius enters eagerly upon the day's task, impatient of any impertinences jogging the full glass. The best comes when we are at our best; and who so buoyant as to be always rider of the wave? Sleep, and see; wake, and report the nocturnal spectacle. Sleep, like travel, enriches, refreshes, by varying the day's perspective, showing us the night side of the globe we traverse day by day. We make transits too swift for our wakeful senses to follow ”

“ Night grants thee the full freedom of the skies,
Nor rudely reprimands thy lifted eye;
With gain, and joy, she bribes thee to be wise. 728
Night opes the noblest scenes, and sheds an awe,
Which gives those venerable scenes full weight,
And deep reception, in th’ intender’d heart;
While light peeps through the darkness, like a spy;
And darkness shows its grandeur by the light.
Nor is the profit greater than the joy,
If human hearts at glorious objects glow,
And admiration can inspire delight. ”

“ Sleep shakes his wings free of us as the day-star quivers overhead, and the quiet visions of the night pass from the kindly darkness and look out upon the new day through our lustrous eyes. There is no waking to the sombre laws that once set us limits in the world; there is no border 'twixt our dreams and our life: on flows the level tide through waking and through sleeping, through light and shadow, day by day and night by night. ”

“ So long as daylight lasts, the stir of the busy world and the business of life ward off these thoughts,—the novelty of the scene even combats them; but when night has closed in, and we see above us the stars that we have known in other lands, the self-same moon by whose light we wandered years ago, and then look around and mark the features of a new world, with objects which tell of another hemisphere; and then think that we are there alone, without tie or link to all around us, the sensation is thrilling in its intensity. ”

“ In life, the mind and the circumstance give the true seasons, and regulate the darkness and the light. Of two men standing on the same foot of earth, the one revels in the joyous noon, the other shudders in the solitude of night. For Hope and Fortune, the day-star is ever shining. ”

“ The gloomy day is gone, and a pleasant evening, enlivened by two calls, ends the scene, and I am ready for sleep to charm me away to the land of dreams, where I may hope to meet those long loved, and long lost. ”

“ In eternal twilight they move, those frail, diaphanous figures, whose tremulous, white feet seem not to touch the dew-drenched grass they tread on. But those who walk in epos, drama, or romance see through the labouring months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the night from evening into morning star, and from sunrise into sun-setting can note the shifting day with all its gold and shadow. ”

“ The sunshine and the shadow lengthen with the dying day,
And, like a dream, the daylight vanishes from earth away.
The western sky is covered with a web of beauty spun
By fairy hands, and woven from the life-tide of the sun. ”

“ Though present in distempered gloom of thought And deadly weariness of heart all day. 10 But when a dream night after night is brought Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many Recur each year for several years, can any Discern that dream from real life in aught? For life is but a dream whose shapes return, 15 Some frequently, some seldom, some by night And some by day, some night and day: we learn, The while all change and many vanish quite, In their recurrence with recurrent changes A certain seeming order; where this ranges 20 We count things real; such is memory's might. ”

“ Is it a Bosom where tired heads may lie?
Is it a Mouth to kiss our weeping dry?
Is it a Hand to still the pulse's leap?
Is it a Voice that holds the runes of sleep?
Day shows us not such comfort anywhere—
Dwells it in Darkness? Do ye find it there?
Out of the Day's deceiving light we call—
Day that shows man so great, and God so small,
That hides the stars, and magnifies the grass—
O is the Darkness too a lying glass! ”

“ Why, my love, ’tis night—
’Tis late wait only for the light.
“The wind howls, and the night is dark,
Wait till the dawn, and then we start.”
“Bah! Day is night and night is day—
I dream in the daytime—come away. ”

“ There is an evening twilight of the heart,
When its wild passion-waves are lull'd to rest,
And the eye sees life's fairy scenes depart,
As fades the day-beam in the rosy west.
'Tis with a nameless feeling of regret
We gaze upon them as they melt away,
And fondly would we bid them linger yet,
But hope is round us with her angel lay,
Hailing afar some happier moonlight hour ”

“ As the cycles went their upward way the heroic figures of the dawn reappear. Some have passed before us; others in the same spirit and power will follow: for the new day a rearisen sun and morning stars to herald it. When it comes let it find us, not drowsy after our night in time, but awake, prepared and ready to go forth from the house of sleep, to stretch hands to the light, to live and labor in joy, having the Gods for our guides and friends. ”

“ Should we jump hastily out of bed and bestir ourselves with the zest of the new day, if we thoroughly realized what is, however, matter of common experience, to wit: that at the day's close, sleep, rest without dreams or thought of awaking, may be as welcome as all this pleasant bustle of the morning? ”

“ They are dreaming by daylight, and if you compel their attention by stopping, and addressing them, you would find them for a moment puzzled and disconcerted, just as a sleeper is when he is awakened before his regular time, and pressed back into life. ”

“ The shadows of the mind are like those of the body. In the morning of life they all lie behind us; at noon, we trample them under foot; and in the evening they stretch long, broad, and deepening before us. Are not, then, the sorrows of childhood as dark as those of age? Are not the morning shadows of life as deep and broad as those of its evening? ”

“ But, above all, on a clear, moonlight night, when all around is still, and when the recollections, and emotions, which such a scene is calculated to excite, are awakened, and exalted by the solemn, congenial serenity of the nocturnal heavens, it is then that fancy and feeling will exert their influence, and take full possession of the mind and heart. ”

“ Some say that the nights were created for the sons of men to sleep, but if it is so, why should the nights be so beautiful to behold, when the moon shines, and the stars tremble and glitter in the blue of the sky? ”

“ We did not dream then of this hour,
This sad, sad hour for you and me;
We did not dream there was a power
Could force us for eternity
To say Good night.
Good night—nay, turn your eyes away;
I cannot bear their tender light.
Now evermore to golden day,
To golden hope, a last Good night,
Good night—Good night.
NO PLACE
When days grow long, and brain and hands grow weary,
And hot the city street,
Forth to the haunts, by cooling winds made cheery
We fly with willing feet. ”