wheels and the voices of my companions seemed like faint sounds of a
dream, and my visions a bright reality. That scribbled page describes
shadows which I summoned to my bedside at midnight: they would not
depart when I bade them; the gray dawn came, and found me wide awake and
feverish, the victim of my own enchantments!...

"Sometimes my ideas were like precious stones under the earth, requiring
toil to dig them up, and care to polish and brighten them; but often a
delicious stream of thought would gush out upon the page at once, like
water sparkling up suddenly in the desert; and when it had passed, I
gnawed my pen hopelessly, or blundered on with cold and miserable toil,
as if there were a wall of ice between me and my subject."

"Do you now perceive a corresponding difference," inquired I, "between
the passages which you wrote so coldly, and those fervid flashes of the
mind?"

"No," said Oberon, tossing the manuscripts on the table. "I find no
traces of the golden pen with which I wrote in characters of fire. My
treasure of fairy coin is changed to worthless dross. My picture,
painted in what seemed the loveliest hues, presents nothing but a faded
and indistinguishable surface. I have been eloquent and poetical and
humorous in a dream,--and behold! it is all nonsense, now that I am
awake....

"I will burn them! Not a scorched syllable shall escape! Would you have
me a damned author--To undergo sneers, taunts, abuse, and cold neglect,
and faint praise, bestowed, for pity's sake, against the giver's
conscience! A hissing and a laughing-stock to my own traitorous
thoughts! An outlaw from the protection of the grave,--one whose ashes