One rarely loses one’s personality in dreams; it is rather intensified,
with all the proper circumstances and relations of it, but I have had
at least one dream in which I seemed to transcend my own circumstance
and condition with remarkable completeness. Even my epoch, my precious
present, I left behind (or ahead, rather), and in my unity with the
persons of my dream I became strictly mediæval. In fact, I have always
called it my mediæval dream, to such as I could get to listen to it;
and it had for its scene a feudal tower, in some waste place; a tower
open at the top, and with a deep, clear pool of water at the bottom,
so that it instantly became known to me, as if I had always known it,
for the Pool Tower. While I stood looking into it, in a mediæval dress
and a mediæval mood, there came flying in at the open door of the ruin
beside me the duke’s hunchback, and after him, furious and shrieking
maledictions, the swarthy beauty whom I was aware the duke was tired
of. The keeping was now not only ducal, but thoroughly Italian, and
it was suggested somehow to my own subtle Italian perception that the
hunchback had been set on to tease the girl, and provoke her so that
she would turn upon him, and try to wreak her fury on him, and chase
him into the Pool Tower, and up the stone stairs that wound round its
hollow to the top, where the solemn sky showed. The fearful spire of
the steps was unguarded, and when I had lost the pair from sight,
with the dwarf’s mocking laughter and the girl’s angry cries in my
ears, there came fluttering from the height, like a bird wounded and
whirling from a lofty tree, the figure of the girl, while far aloof
the hunchback peered over at her fall. Midway in her descent her head
struck against the edge of the steps, with a _kish_, such as an
egg-shell makes when broken against the edge of a platter, and then
plunged into the dark pool at my feet, where I could presently see her
lying in the clear depths, and the blood curling upward from the wound
in her skull, like a dark smoke. I was not sensible of any great pity;
I accepted the affair, quite mediævally, as something that might very
well have happened, given the girl, the duke and the dwarf, and the
time and place.