To say truth, we never anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as ’tis called), to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day’s pleasuring, but we suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and headachs; Nature herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our presumption, in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the measures of that celestial and sleepless traveller.  We deny not that there is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in these break-of-day excursions.  It is flattering to get the start of a lazy world; to conquer death by proxy in his image.  But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually in strange qualms, before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion.  Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, are already up and about their occupations, content to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale; we chose to linger a-bed, and digest our dreams.  It is the very time to recombine the wandering images, which night in a confused mass presented; to snatch them from forgetfulness; to shape, and mould them.  Some people have no good of their dreams.  Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly, to taste them curiously.  We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision:  to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to drag into day-light a struggling and half-vanishing night-mare; to handle and examine the terrors, or the airy solaces.  We have too much respect for these spiritual communications, to let them go so lightly.  We are not so stupid, or so careless, as that Imperial forgetter of his dreams, that we should need a seer to remind us of the form of them.  They seem to us to have as much significance as our waking concerns; or rather to import us more nearly, as more nearly we approach by years to the shadowy world, whither we are hastening.  We have shaken hands with the world’s business; we have done with it; we have discharged ourself of it.  Why should we get up? we have neither suit to solicit, nor affairs to manage.  The drama has shut in upon us at the fourth act.  We have nothing here to expect, but in a short time a sick bed, and a dismissal.  We delight to anticipate death by such shadows as night affords.  We are already half acquainted with ghosts.  We were never much in the world.  Disappointment early struck a dark veil between us and its dazzling illusions.  Our spirits showed grey before our hairs.  The mighty changes of the world already appear as but the vain stuff out of which dramas are composed.  We have asked no more of life than what the mimic images in play-houses present us with.  Even those types have waxed fainter.  Our clock appears to have struck.  We are SUPERANNUATED. In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, we contract politic alliances with shadows.  It is good to have friends at court.  The abstracted media of