The Monthly Miscellany (Volume 8)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A DREAM. Looking over some old papers a few days since, I came across an article written by myself in the year 18?, a year, perhaps the most eventful in my life. Without stopping to recount all the incidents of that period, I will barely mention, that it was the year of my failure in business, induced partly by misfortune, but mainly by a neglect of prudence and frugality in the management of my business and domestic economy. The night preceding my failure was a night of inward storm; clouds and darkness brooded over my whole mental being; hope, I had none; faith, I had none. In such a state I retired to rest, and dreamed a dream. This phantom of the night made so deep an impression, I could not refrain putting it on paper. Upon seeing it after a lapse of so many years, it struck me that it might be a useful fragment in the Miscellany. It would make me glad to be the means of reaching some readers, nay, a single reader, who (like myself in other days, ) may be wearing out life in hewing cisterns that can hold no- water. Of course you are at liberty to preface the dream with any remarks showing, if necessary, more distinctly the moral involved in it. It has one advantage over most dreams, that it is not all fiction. The gist of it is true, the dressing merely is my own. After a day of feverish excitement, induced by many fruitless efforts to hire or borrow money, to meet engagements at Bank, I returned to my home wrapped in gloom, and suffering a disquietude that no language can describe. Throwing myself from very physical exhaustion on the bed, I hoped that nature, tired nature, would triumph over my menial perturbation, ?that sleep, sweet angel of mercy, would cut off all remembrance of the past, and by her invisible ministry renew for me sufficient strength to face...