Nor are dreams without their variety, whatever your character may be. I
care not how much in the pride of your practical judgment, or in your
learned fancies, you may sneer at any dream of love, and reckon it all a
poet's fiction: there are times when such dreams come over you like a
summer-cloud, and almost stifle you with their warmth.

Seek as you will for increase of lands or moneys, and there are moments
when a spark of some giant mind will flash over your cravings, and wake
your soul suddenly to a quick and yearning sense of that influence which
is begotten of intellect; and you task your dreams--as I have copied
them here--to build before you the pleasures of such a renown.

I care not how worldly you may be: there are times when all distinctions
seem like dust, and when at the graves of the great you dream of a
coming country, where your proudest hopes shall be dimmed forever.

Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a
dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a
dream. Yet you call this fiction: you stave off the thoughts in print
which come over you in reverie. You will not admit to the eye what is
true to the heart. Poor weakling, and worldling, you are not strong
enough to face yourself!

You will read perhaps with smiles; you will possibly praise the
ingenuity; you will talk with a lip schooled against the slightest
quiver of some bit of pathos, and say that it is--well done. Yet why is
it well done?--only because it is stolen from your very life and heart.
It is good, because it is so common; ingenious, because it is so honest;
well-conceived, because it is not conceived at all.