Chapter I

Our life is twofold: sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence; sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality;
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past,--they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power--
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not--what they will,
And make us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanished shadows.--Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? What are they?
Creations of the mind?--The mind can make
Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recall a vision which I dreamed
Perchance in sleep--for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.