In another dream the Guide had been the witness of the scene he described, and his story was so vivid that I still feel as if I had seen it with my own eyes and had not simply heard it told in a dream.

I had been re-reading Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads," and reading Mr. Gosse's "Life of Swinburne"; and by a natural transition my mind had wandered away at times to Shelley. That night "my dream was of Swinburne's death. The Guide who was with me had himself seen the end; and he told me how the poet had died. Death had come to him, the Guide said, in the midst of war, in a battle-plane high over the fields of France. He felt sure that a bullet had struck the poet; but almost at the same moment the plane had fallen, diving downwards in flames, burning very fiercely. As he described it he made me see vividly the very scene, and the little bright flames against the sky licking up to the burning wings of the plane as it fell. 'And so,' the Guide said - and his words ran in a sort of chant - 'Swinburne was happy, as Shelley was happy in his death - Sea and Fire for the one -death above the clouds for the other, a soaring death, and for them both at last Fire.' "

The dream passed on to other scenes of war in France. Waking from it, it was hard to believe that it was not real, that things had not happened so; and hours afterwards, when I copied out the rough shorthand note of the early morning, it seemed easier to believe in the story as it was told to me than to believe in the end that history records - "the motionless existence of the little old genius, and his little old acolyte, in their dull little villa" at Putney.1

If it is sometimes hard to believe that the actors who take part in these dreams come, not from without, but from within our own consciousness, the belief is even harder in the case of dreams which seem to give back to us for a little while the presence of those whom we have loved, and who are parted from us. They may come to us in "clear dream and solemn vision"- we do not question how they come; their presence seems for the moment as real as the comfort that they bring.

1 E. Gosse, "Life of Swinburne".

Come to me in my dreams and then By day I shall be well again; For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day.1

There must be many who have sorrowed, who have found with the wise physician that" there is a nearer apprehension of anything that delights us in our dreams than in our waked senses; without this I were unhappy; for my awaked judgment discon-. tents me, ever whispering unto me that I am from my friend; but my friendly dreams in the night requite me, and make me think I am within his arms."2

The unhappy, the desolate, may still find in dreams, and only in dreams, the "certain knot of peace, the balm of woe" that Sir Philip Sidney found in them, when he had fallen on evil days, and when grief and disappointment had become familiar to him. In dreams the sorrowful may find the place that they seek, where pain is stilled, and where for a little while love may revisit them. And having found it, they long for a spell which would summon these "friendly dreams" more often. But these are just the dreams which elude our spells, and over which the simple rules of dream control that I know have no power. Other dreams tend to become more and more obedient to the will, but the power of voluntary dreaming stops short here, and the dreamer has, I believe, little power to call up the dreams that would bring him the greatest comfort. They will come, but not at our bidding; we can only await them, and be grateful for their coming, and for the transient solace that they bring.

1 Matthew Arnold. 2 Sir Thomas Browne.

But dear and welcome as these dreams are, vivid as they may be, I have never felt about them the conviction that I feel about somewhat similar experiences occurring in the transition time between waking and sleeping and waking - the certainty that they come from "without," not from "within"; the confident sense of the presence of one known to me who, though unseen, is able to communicate clearly and directly with me by channels other than the ordinary channels of sense. Even the most convincing of dreams seem to me to belong to a different plane of experience from this. It is possible that the psychologist may say that he does not recognise such a distinction between mental phenomena on the hither side of sleep and those occurring after its borderland has been crossed. I do not know - the question is full of difficulty - but personally I feel assured that the experiences that I am familiar with in the earlier stage of the borderland state are actually of a very different order from any dreams that I have known.

Of the dreams of which I have spoken, I am content to believe that love co-operates with memory, and memory with imagination, in ereating them; and, like Sir Thomas Browne, "I do thank God for my happy dreams, as I do for my good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable desires and such as can be content with a fit of happiness."1

1 Sir Thomas Browne, "Religio Medici".