The Works of the Right Honourable Lord Byron; In Five [I.E. Six] Volumes (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 43 THE DREAM. Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world, A boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world, And a wide realm of wild reality, And dreams in their developement have breath, And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy; They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, They take a weight from off our waking toils, They do divide our being; they become A portion of ourselves as of our time, 10 And look like heralds of eternity; They pass like spirits of the past, ?they speak Like sybils of the future; they have power? The tyranny of pleasure and of pain; They make us what we were not?what they will, And shake us with the vision that's gone by, The dread of vanish'd shadows?Are they so ? Is not the past all shadow ? What are they ? Creations of the mind The mind can make Substance, and people-planets of its own 20 With beings brighter than have been, and give A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh. I would recall a vision which I dream'd Perchance in sleep?for in itself a thought, A slumbering thought, is capable of years, And curdles a long life into one hour. I saw two beings in the hues of youth Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill, ', Green and of mild declivity, the last As 'twere the cape of a long ridge of such, 30 Save that there was no sea to lave its base, But a most living landscape, and the wave Of woods and cornfields, and the abodes of men Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke Arising from such rustic roofs;?the hill Was crown'd with a peculiar diadem Of trees, in circular array, so fix'd, Not by the sport of nature, but of man: These two, a maiden and a youth, were there Gazing?the one on all that was...