love is false to me.
Why should the moonlit sky,
Why should the moaning sea,
Recall the empty dream of the
When my love is false to me?
Pierce to his soul, O stars!
Thrill to his heart, O sea!
It may be, smit with a sudden
My love will come back to me!
THE brain makes ghosts both
sleeping and waking. A man was lying in troubled sleep when a phantom, with the
cold hand of a corpse, seized his right arm. Awaking in horror, he found upon
his arm still the impression of the cold hand of the corpse, and it was only
after reflecting that he found the terrible apparition to be due to the
deadening of his own left hand in a frosty night, which had subsequently grasped
his right arm. This was a real ghost of the brain, which the awakening of the
senses and the understanding explained. M. Gratiolet narrates a dream of his own
which is singularly illustrative of how the brain makes ghosts in sleep. Many
years ago, when occupied in studying the organization of the brain, he prepared
a great number both of human and animal brains. He carefully stripped off the
membranes, and placed the brains in alcohol. Such were his daily occupations,
when one night he thought that he had taken out his own brain from his own
skull. He stripped it of its membranes. He put it into alcohol, and then he
fancied he took his brain out of the alcohol and replaced it in his skull. But,
contracted by the action of the spirit, it was much reduced in size, and did not
at all fill up the skull. He felt it shuffling about in his head. This feeling
threw him into such a great perplexity that he awoke with a start, as if from
M. Gratiolet, every time he
prepared the brain of a man, must have felt that his own brain resembled it.
This impression awakening in a brain imperfectly asleep, while neither the
senses nor the judgment were active, the physiologist carried on an operation in
his sleep which probably had often occurred to his fancy when at his work, and
which had then been summarily dismissed very frequently. A pursuit which had at
last become one of routine, and the association of himself with his study,
explain the bizarre and ghastly dream of M. Gratiolet. A sensation from the
gripe of a cold hand, misinterpreted by the imagination acting without the aid
of the discerning faculties, accounts for the ghastly vision of the other
Every one is conscious of a
perpetual series of pictures, sometimes stationary, sometimes fleeting,
generally shifting; yet occasionally fixed in his mind. Sleep is the period in
which the nerves derive their nourishment from the blood. The picturing nerves,
like those of the senses, are generally inactive in their functions at feeding
times; and thoroughly healthy nervous systems dream very little or not at all.
Dreams betoken troubled brains. The brain of a woman who had lost a portion of
her cranium used to swell up and protrude when she was dreaming, and then
contract and become tranquil again when she was sleeping soundly.
The wakeful senses, the active
judgment, and the will even of the strongest and soundest minds, are not always
able to control the false and perverse
impressions of the nerves. I knew
once a commander in the navy whose left eye was shot clean out by a bullet in a
naval action in the beginning of this century, and whom, forty years afterward,
it was impossible to convince that he did not see all sorts of strange objects
with his lost eye. "It is not impossible," he would quietly say; "I know it too
well." Every body has known men who suffered rheumatism in legs long lost and
replaced by wooden ones.
A nervous, dreamy, imaginative
lad was walking one day with some comrades among rank grass. The place was noted
for adders, and the youths talked about them. Instantly this lad felt something
enter the leg of his pantaloons and twist itself with the swiftness of lightning
round his thigh. He stopped terrified, and a careful examination proved that the
adder was a creature of his imagination. The vividness of the fancy of this
youth made his waking senses and his discerning faculties of no more use to him
for the m