would be,--"Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" I have so much
faith in my old friend's theory, that when I feel that idle vein
returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element of
prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious
inland landing.

[Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.]




MY RELATIONS


I am arrived at that point of life, at which a man may account it a
blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have either of his parents
surviving. I have not that felicity--and sometimes think feelingly of
a passage in Browne's Christian Morals, where he speaks of a man that
hath lived sixty or seventy years in the world. "In such a compass of
time," he says, "a man may have a close apprehension what it is to
be forgotten, when he hath lived to find none who could remember his
father, or scarcely the friends of his youth, and may sensibly see
with what a face in no long time OBLIVION will look upon himself."

I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one whom single
blessedness had soured to the world. She often used to say, that I
was the only thing in it which she loved; and, when she thought I was
quitting it, she grieved over me with mother's tears. A partiality
quite so exclusive my reason cannot altogether approve. She was from
morning till night poring over good books, and devotional exercises.