Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 4.djvu/63

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THE DREAM.



I.

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;[1] 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 Sibyls 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,[2]
The dread of vanished 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 own20
  1. [Compare—
    "Come, blessed barrier between day and day."
    "Sonnet to Sleep," Works of W. Wordsworth, 1889, p. 354.]
  2. [Compare—

    "...the night's dismay
    Saddened and stunned the coming day."

    The Pains of Sleep, lines 33, 34, by S. T. Coleridge,

    Poetical Works, 1893, p. 170.]