We bless and curse ourselves.  Some dreams are divine, as well as some waking thoughts.  Donne sings of one

     “Who dreamt devoutlier than most use to pray.”

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.  We are scarcely less afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our conduct in a dream, than if it had been actual, and the intensity of our grief, which is our atonement, measures the degree by which this is separated from an actual unworthiness.  For in dreams we but act a part which must have been learned and rehearsed in our waking hours, and no doubt could discover some waking consent thereto.  If this meanness had not its foundation in us, why are we grieved at it?  In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.  But an unwavering and commanding virtue would compel even its most fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its ever-wakeful authority; as we are accustomed to say carelessly, we should never have dreamed of such a thing.  Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

     “And, more to lulle him in his slumber soft,
     A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe,
     And ever-drizzling raine upon the loft,
     Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne
     Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne. 
     No other noyse, nor people’s troublous cryes,
     As still are wont t’ annoy the walled towne,
     Might there be heard; but careless Quiet lyes
     Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enemyes.”

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THURSDAY.

“He trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon
The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone,
Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,
And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker.
. . . . 
Where darkness found him he lay glad at night;
There the red morning touched him with its light.
. . . . 
Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth,—­his hall the azure dome;
Where his clear spirit leads him, there’s his road,
By God’s own light illumined and foreshowed.”
^Emerson^.

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THURSDAY.

—­*—­

When we awoke this morning, we heard the faint, deliberate, and ominous sound of rain-drops on our cotton roof.  The rain had pattered all night, and now the whole country wept, the drops falling in the river, and on the alders, and in the pastures, and instead of any bow in the heavens, there was the trill of the hair-bird all the morning.  The cheery faith of this little bird atoned for the silence of the whole woodland choir beside.  When we first stepped abroad, a flock of sheep, led by their rams, came rushing down a ravine in our rear, with heedless haste and unreserved frisking, as if unobserved by man, from some higher pasture where they had spent the night, to taste the herbage by the river-side; but