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and to trace by a voluntary act upon the darkness, was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams; so that I feared to exercise this faculty- for, as Midas turned all things to gold that yet baffled his hopes and defrauded his human desires, so, whatsoever things capable of being visually represented I did but think of in the darkness, immediately shaped themselves into phantoms of the eye; and, by a process apparently no less inevitable when thus once traced in faint and visionary colours, like writings in sympathetic ink, they were drawn out, by the fierce chemistry of my dreams, into insufferable splendour that fretted my heart. For this, and all other changes in my dreams, were accompanied by deepseated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable by words. I seemed every night to descend, not metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, depths, below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever reascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I had reascended. This I do not dwell upon, because the state of gloom which attended these gorgeous spectacles, amounting at least to utter darkness, as of some suicidical despondency, cannot be approached by words. The sense of space, and, in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully effected. Buildings and Landscapes were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive; space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience. The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived; I could not be said to recollect them, for if I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience: but placed as they were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognised them instantaneously. I was once told by a near relation of mine, that having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the critical assistance which reached her, she saw in a moment her whole life, in its minutest incidents, arrayed before her simultaneously, as in a mirror, and she had a faculty, developed as suddenly, for comprehending the whole and every part. This, from some opium experiences of mine, I can believe; I have, indeed, seen the same thing asserted twice in modern

books, and accompanied by a remark which I am convinced is true; viz. that the dread Book of account, which the Scriptures speak of, is, in fact, the mind itself of each individual. Of this at least I feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscription on the mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, this inscription remains for ever. Just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day; whereas, in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil, and that they are waiting to be revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn."- English Opium Eater.

October 21. SS. Ursula and others Virgins Martyrs. St. Hilarion Institutor of Monasteries in the East. St. Fintan Abbot of Ireland.

FLORA.--The Virginia Creeper Hedera quinquefolia is particularly rich and beautiful in the Autumnal Months, with its leaves of every hue, from a bright to a dark green and deep crimson.

CHRONOLOGY. Battle of Trafalgar. Nelson killed in 1805.

Richard Gough the celebrated Antiquary born in 1735, in a house in Winchester Street, London, on the site of the Monastery of Augustine Friars. He died at his house at Enfield, Feb. 20, 1809.

The following lines were addressed to Mr. Gough by an old and particular friend :

To Richard Gough, Esq.

O tu severi Religio loci!

Hail, Genius of this littered study!

Or tell what name you most delight in;
For sure where all the ink is muddy,
And no clean margin left to write in,
No common deity resides.

We see, we feel thy power divine,
In every tattered folio's dust,
Each mangled manuscript is thine,
And thine the antique helmet's rust.
Nor less observed thy power presides

Where plundered brasses crowd the floor,
Or dog'seared drawings burst their binding
Hid by Confusion's puzzling door

Beyond the reach of mortal finding.

Than if beneath a costly roof

Each moulding edged by golden fillet,

The Russian binding, insectproof,

Blushed at the foppery of

Give me, when tired by dust and sun,
If rightly I thy name invoke,
The bustle of the town to shun,

And breathe unvext by city smoke.
But, ah! if from these cobwebbed walls,
And from this mothembroidered cushion,
Too fretful Fortune rudely calls,

Resolved the cares of life to push on-
Give me at least to pass my age
At ease in some booktapestried cell,
Where I may turn the pictured page,
Nor start at visitants' loud bell.

The following Stanzas, said to have been written on a blank leaf of Rogers's Pleasures of Memory, were sent to us this day by the post:

To Memory.

Pleasures of Memory!-Oh supremely blest,
And justly proud beyond a poet's praise;
If the pure confines of thy tranquil breast
Contain, indeed, the subject of thy lays!
By me how envied! for to me,
The herald still of misery,

Memory makes her influence known,
By sighs, and tears, and grief alone:

I greet her as the fiend, to whom belong

The Vulture's ravening beak, the Raven's funeral song.
She tells of time misspent, of comfort lost,
of fair occasions gone for ever by;

Of hopes too fondly nursed, too rudely crossed,
Of many a cause to wish, yet fear to die:
For what, except th' instinctive fear
Lest she survive, detains me here,
When "all the life of life" is fled?
What but the deep inherent dread,

Lest she beyond the grave resume her reign,

And realise the hell that priests and beldames feign?

October 22. St. Philip and others Martyrs. St. Do

natus Bishop. St. Mello.

and Confessor.

and Martyrs.

St. Mark Bishop

SS. Nunilo and Alodia Virgins

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We have seen in some chronologies the Feast of Salone, the wife of Zebedee and mother of St. Janus major, recorded today.

CHRONOLOGY.-The death of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, the celebrated naval commander, is recorded to have happened on this day in 1707 by shipwreck, whereby his whole crew were also lost. He was returning with the fleet from the Siege of Toulon.

About this time in 1823, the third satellite of 2 was observed, with

a refracting telescope of the power of 60°, to be somewhat decreased in size and splendour.

HYGEIA. In a former medical article we cautioned our readers against the too free use of Opium, and other strong drugs, and described some of their most powerful consequences on the nervous system, and consequently on the mind; and we promised to renew the subject today. See October 2d and 20th, and September 26th.

The mode in which Opium affects the system in general when given in the way before described, seems to be that of exciting a more powerful and agreeable action of the nervous powers, so that the mind feels for the time more ponderibus librata suis, as an excellent commentator on Opium calls it. This state, however, with the utmost care and management, cannot be long maintained; for, like all other sources of artificial strength imparted to the nervous powers, Opium in the end leads to a greater degree of relaxation and failure of power than ordinary, though it does not do so in the same fatal degree that Wine and strong spirits do, nor with such danger to the destruction of vital organs. But after Opium has been taken inordinately for any length of time, there is in some constitutions a terrific nervous malady occasioned by it, which seems, as far as our observations have enabled us to fathom it, to consist in an ungovernable, and, as it were, spontaneous action during sleep, of those Organs of the Brain which, in our waking hours, furnish us with a knowledge of the material world, and which, by their secondary activity, produce all our recollections of the forms and qualities of objects, and all the varieties of our thoughts. We have before alluded to the fact, which physiologists have by degrees developed, but which Kant and the German school of metaphysicians have more fully established, that we know the Object only in the relation to the Subject, that is to say, the forms, colours, and feel of external objects, are known to us by means of corresponding actions which they excite in the Organs of the Brain; and those Organs in the Brain can so repeat the said actions, as to reproduce in our Minds the forms of absent external Objects. The effect, then, which we have alluded to as being produced by Opium, is that of exciting an exaggerated degree of this spontaneous activity, so as to produce not only the most terrific and whimsical dreams, but to cause visions or waking dreams, whereby ignorant people may imagine they see Spectres or Ghosts of departed Persons, or any other strange and hideous form, which, from the peculiar organization and nature of their own minds, influenced by moral circumstances, may have

become the objects of their thoughts. Dreams, however, afford the most frequent examples of this morbid imagination; and what is very remarkable in dreams is this, that over the most common phenomena, seen in them, there is a gleam of mysterious and peculiar sui generis horror cast by the magic spell of sleep, which at once distinguishes them from waking thoughts, and which is only approached by the kind of fear that sometimes attends waking Visions. The precise cause of these sensations, like those peculiar sensations of pleasure and pain which attend the hypochondriacal recollections of early childhood, remain as yet a desideratum in the Physiology of the Brain. In sleep, those powers which constitute the Will, often lie dormant; in sleep, the more vivid impressions of external objects being shut out, the real world no longer manifests its stronger claims to our attention over those of the world ideal; and hence, perhaps, from an incongruous Association of acting Organs, Scenes and Feelings are presented to the percipient Mind in strange, astonishing, and fearful combinations. As, however, Thoughts, and consequently Dreams in general, are made up of recollected impressions newly combined, so the peculiar bias and nature of the Mind of the Individual cause the peculiarities of his Dreams in particular. The light Dreams of healthy and sparingly indulged Sleep are of no moment, and the common Thoughts which we entertain in bed, are often gently nuanced or shaded off into them, in proportion as by degrees we lose the consciousness of Waking Impressions, and bestow our credulity on the Phantoms of Thought. But when the Stomach and other digestive Organs are disordered, or the nervous system more immediately acted on by Opium, then it is that the terrific tyranny of Dreams takes place which realize the fictions of a modern poet of the Pains of Sleep, and which convert those envied slumbers of repose intended by nature for our refreshment, into periods of anticipated horror. We have known this state of the Imagination brought on by the long use of Calomel, of Wine, and of the exciting passions after their suspense; but by nothing more certainly than by Opium. We have before quoted an acute modern writer on this subject; and, as a warning to Europeans, who cannot cope with Oriental nations in power to take the juice of the Poppy with impunity, we shall subjoin another quotation from the same author. See October 20th. After describing the progress of his mental disorder, he observes:

"And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding slowly like a scroll, through many months, promised an

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