"Sileni, and sylvans, and fawns, And the nymphs of the woods and waves;" though sometimes there might be gloomier intimations of a retributive Nemesis, and unconquerable Destiny, and even Pallas herself might " frown severe."*

It would be wearisome to my hoarers to carry a like train of thought to the Scandinavian Pantheon, - to the halls of Odin, the regions of the Thunder-God, - to the Gods and Heroes of our ancestors; or across the Atlantic to those primeval cities and monuments, overgrown by monstrous forests, in Yucatan. Yet wherever we trace the footsteps of the religions of by-gone ages, we feel assured that the same tracks were haunted by the dreams of the men of old.

But it is enough to bear in mind what we experience in our own nightly visions. Dreams are much to be honoured and valued, seeing that in the wonderful shapes of thought which they sometimes present to us, we are gifted with conceptions of the ideal, - divine possibilities, - a consummation of grandeur and beauty, beyond anything which actual life can furnish; - glimpses of

"Worlds, whose course is equable and pure,-

............... more pellucid streams,

An ampler ether, a diviner air, And fields invested with purpurea! gleams; Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey."

And thus, like the revelations of philosophy, the embodiments

* "And Pallas frowned severe." - Landor's Hellenics. "Shades of Iphigenia and Agamemnon." of art, and the inspirations of poetry, dreams, too, may tend to refine and sublimate our thoughts, weaning us from low desires, and raising our aspirations towards a state of existence, of which all that here is best, and fairest, and greatest, is but a faint shadow, and may be remembered in that purer world, like one of the most incomplete of our earthly visions; as a dream, in which whatever was beautiful was in fragments, in which the mean and the sublime were incongruously intermingled, and in which moral perfection was ever eluding the grasp; in which love was not free from some alloy of selfishness, nor hope unmixed with fear.