MY DREAM.
I think I will tell the dream I had. I cannot well account for the
beginning of it: the end will appear sufficiently explicable to those
who are quite satisfied that they get rid of the mystery of a thing
when they can associate it with something else with which they are
familiar. Such do not care to see that the thing with which they
associate it may be as mysterious as the other. For although use too
often destroys marvel, it cannot destroy the marvellous. The origin of
our thoughts is just as wonderful as the origin of our dreams.
In my dream I found myself in a pleasant field full of daisies and
white clover. The sun was setting. The wind was going one way, and the
shadows another. I felt rather tired, I neither knew nor thought why.
With an old man's prudence, I would not sit down upon the grass, but
looked about for a more suitable seat. Then I saw, for often in our
dreams there is an immediate response to our wishes, a long, rather
narrow stone lying a few yards from me. I wondered how it could have
come there, for there were no mountains or rocks near: the field was
part of a level country. Carelessly, I sat down upon it astride, and
watched the setting of the sun. Somehow I fancied that his light was
more sorrowful than the light of the setting sun should be, and I began
to feel very heavy at the heart. No sooner had the last brilliant spark
of his light vanished, than I felt the stone under me begin to move.
With the inactivity of a dreamer, however, I did not care to rise, but
wondered only what would come next. My seat, after several strange
tumbling motions, seemed to rise into the air a little way, and then I
found that I was astride of a gaunt, bony horse--a skeleton horse
almost, only he had a gray skin on him. He began, apparently with pain,
as if his joints were all but too stiff to move, to go forward in the
direction in which he found himself. I kept my seat. Indeed, I never
thought of dismounting. I was going on to meet what might come. Slowly,
feebly, trembling at every step, the strange steed went, and as he went
his joints seemed to become less stiff, and he went a little faster.
All at once I found that the pleasant field had vanished, and that we
were on the borders of a moor. Straight forward the horse carried me,
and the moor grew very rough, and he went stumbling dreadfully, but
always recovering himself. Every moment it seemed as if he would fall
to rise no more, but as often he found fresh footing. At length the
surface became a little smoother, and he began a horrible canter which
lasted till he reached a low, broken wall, over which he half walked,
half fell into what was plainly an ancient neglected churchyard. The
mounds were low and covered with rank grass. In some parts, hollows had
taken the place of mounds. Gravestones lay in every position except the
level or the upright, and broken masses of monuments were scattered
about. My horse bore me into the midst of it, and there, slow and stiff
as he had risen, he lay down again. Once more I was astride of a long
narrow stone. And now I found that it was an ancient gravestone which I
knew well in a certain Sussex churchyard, the top of it carved into the
rough resemblance of a human skeleton--that of a man, tradition said,
who had been killed by a serpent that came out of a bottomless pool in
the next field. How long I sat there I do not know; but at last I saw
the faint gray light of morning begin to appear in front of me. The
horse of death had carried me eastward. The dawn grew over the top of a
hill that here rose against the horizon. But it was a wild dreary
dawn--a blot of gray first, which then stretched into long lines of
dreary yellow and gray, looking more like a blasted and withered sunset
than a fresh sunrise. And well it suited that waste, wide, deserted
churchyard, if churchyard I ought to call it where no church was to be
seen--only a vast hideous square of graves. Before me I noticed
especially one old grave, the flat stone of which had broken in two and
sunk in the middle. While I sat with my eyes fixed on this stone, it
began to move; the crack in the middle closed, then widened again as
the two halves of the stone were lifted up, and flung outward, like the
two halves of a folding door. From the grave rose a little child,
smiling such perfect contentment as if he had just come from kissing
his mother. His little arms had flung the stones apart, and as he stood
on the edge of the grave next to me, they remained outspread from the
action for a moment, as if blessing the sleeping people. Then he came
towards me with the same smile, and took my hand. I rose, and he led me
away over another broken wall towards the hill that lay before us. And
as we went the sun came nearer, the pale yellow bars flushed into
orange and rosy red, till at length the edges of the clouds were swept
with an agony of golden light, which even my dreamy eyes could not
endure, and I awoke weeping for joy.
This waking woke my wife, who said in some alarm:
"What is the matter, husband?"
So I told her my dream, and how in my sleep my gladness had overcome me.
"It was this little darling that set you dreaming so," she said, and
turning, put the baby in my arms.