intense meditation, or to present themselves before his eyes as the projection of a powerful inner impression. All his sensations were abnormally acute, and his ever-active imagination confused the borderlands of the actual and the visionary."

The account given by Hogg, of his "slumbers resembling a profound lethargy," tells us that "he lay occasionally upon the sofa, but more commonly stretched out before a large fire, like a cat; and his little round head was exposed to such a fierce heat, that I used to wonder how he was able to bear it. . . . His torpor was generally profound, but he would sometimes discourse incoherently for a long time in his sleep." Then "he would suddenly start up, and, rubbing his eyes with great violence, and passing his fingers swiftly through his long hair, would enter at once into a vehement argument, or begin to recite verses, either of his own composition or from the works of others, with a rapidity and an energy that were often quite painful.' 1 Curiously this bodily heat was with Shelley conducive to dreams and poetry. "The Cenci" was written in the warm sun on his roof at Leghorn. "When my brain gets heated with a thought," he said, "it soon boils." In such a mood he wrote "The Triumph of Life." "The intense stirring of his imagination implied by this supreme poetic effort, the solitude of the Villa Magni, and the elemental fervor of Italian heat to which he recklessly exposed himself, contributed to make Shelley more than usually nervous. His somnambulism returned, and he saw visions. On one occasion he thought that the dead Allegra rose from the sea, and clapped her hands, and laughed, and beckoned to him. On another he roused the whole house at night by his screams, and remained terror-frozen in the trance produced by an appalling vision." A study of Shelley's life shows that this power of vision is to be identified with his poetic faculty. He speaks of his writings as "little else than visions," as "dreams of what ought to be or may be." 4

George Sand was born to be a writer of romances. Particu

1 Shelley, pp. 91, 30. Note by Mrs. Shelley.

Symonds, Shelley, pp. 166, 177. 4"Dedication" of the "Cenci."

larly notable in her case is the typical character in childhood which announces the literary genius. Aurore Dupin was a highly gifted child, but like other gifted children, as Sully observes, she seemed not less but more of a child because of her gifts. She was high strung, animated, affectionate, and sensitive; she suffered the terrors and enjoyed the delights of the imaginative child. She was so carried away in her play that, for example, in playing at crossing the windings of a river, rudely marked with chalk on the floor, "I lost all notion of reality," she says, "and believed I could see the trees, the water, the rocks,-a vast country-and the sky, now bright, now laden with clouds which were about to burst and increase the danger of crossing the river." She could ever after recall the astonishment she felt upon being called back from one such hallucination to the real objects about her. Her environment-the large horizons of the Vallée Noire, the old château at Nohant, the rustic legends and superstitions, the rapidly changing events of the Napoleonic erafostered in her an imaginative view of life. In nearly every chapter of the Histoire de ma Vie dealing with her childhood, she recounts reveries and dreams, visions and "nouvelles visions." The retreat from Moscow, for example, excited her imagination. "I had strange dreams, flights of the imagination which gave me a fever and filled my sleep with phantoms. . . . I imagined I possessed wings, that I darted through space, and that peering into the abysses of the horizon I discovered the vast snows and the endless steppes of White Russia," etc. This waking dreama kind of hallucination, she calls it-of the Emperor recurred for several years.2

Like Walter Scott, she began very early to tell herself stories. When she was four years old her mother used to shut her "within four chairs." To lighten the captivity, "I composed aloud interminable stories which my mother called my romances. . . . She declared them terribly tiresome because of their length and the development I gave to the digressions. 1 See Sully, Studies of Childhood, p. 489.

'Histoire de ma Vie, Troisième partie, chaps. v, vii.

There were few wicked characters and never any great misfortunes. Everything came out right under the influence of a thought smiling and optimistic as childhood." George Sand's mature romances show the same optimism, tedium, and digression.1 Presently she conceived a long series of scenes and songs, with a dream-hero, "Corambé," a mixture of myth, epos, and religion, to which I shall refer in a later chapter. These imaginations were suspended during her life at the convent for the composing of two romances-her first writing-and then resumed. When finally George Sand came to write her mature novels she had only to describe, as she says, quickly, easily, and without fatigue, the train of persons, actions, landscapes presented by her imagination. Her stories were facile improvisations.

Stevenson has a "Chapter on Dreams," describing his own experience, which is so instructive that if space permitted it should be quoted here entire." "He was from a child," he tells us, "an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer;" as a child he had terrible dream-haunted nights. While a student in Edinburgh he began "to dream in sequence, and thus to lead a double lifeone of the day, one of the night"--which soon sent him "trembling for his reason" to the doctor. He "had long been in the custom of setting himself to sleep with tales, and so had his father before him." It is not strange, then, that he "began to read in his dreams-tales, for the most part, and for the most part after the manner of G. P. R. James, but so incredibly more vivid and moving than any printed books, that he has ever since been malcontent with literature." "But presently," he continues, "my dreamer began to turn his former amusement of story-telling to (what is called) account; by which I mean that he began to write and sell his tales. Here was he, and here were the little people who did that part of his business, in quite new conditions. The stories must now be trimmed and pared and set upon all fours, they must run from a beginning to an end and fit (after a manner) with the laws of life; the pleasure in a word had be1 See Doumic, George Sand, p. 76.

2 Works, Thistle edition, vol. xv, p. 250.

come a business; and that not only for the dreamer but for the little people of his theatre. These understood the change as well as he. When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought amusement, but printable and profitable tales; and after he had dozed off in his box-seat, his little people continued their evolutions with the same mercantile designs." Thus the scenes of some of Stevenson's tales, for instance of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," were first enacted in this dream theatre; and these tales were, as he represents them, a collaboration between himself and what he calls his "little people"-that is, between his conscious waking intellect and his dream faculty. "Will o' the Mill" shows that Stevenson has perfectly the theory of the dream.

The characters I have thus summarized are typical rather than exceptional in the poetic class. Some poets, like Chatterton and Blake, would show more of the character we associate with the word "visionary;" others, like Tennyson and Longfellow, would show less. But even Tennyson had visions and trance-like states. This visionary thought is that which produces poetry— and that which requires explanation.

CHAPTER III

WE

TWO MODES OF THOUGHT

I

E think in two ways, I said at the end of Chapter I-in one way when we work and in another when we dream; and of the second of these I have given various examples in the chapter preceding. These two ways of thinking must now be considered in detail. They correspond in part to the two kinds of thought recognized by the psychologists, for which we may as well refer to one of the earliest psychologists to make this distinction. "Mental discourse," says Hobbes in Leviathan, "is of two sorts. The first is unguided, without design, and inconstant; wherein there is no passionate thought, to govern and direct those that follow to itself, as the end and scope of some desire or other passion: in which case the thoughts are said to wander, and seem impertinent one to another, as in dream. Such are the thoughts of men who are not only without company but without care of anything. . . . The second is more constant; as being regulated by some desire, or design." The first is merely associative thought, consisting of a succession of images, one calling up another freely and spontaneously, by either contiguity or similarity. "The train of imagery wanders at its own sweet will, now trudging in the sober grooves of habit, now with a hop, skip, and jump darting across the whole field of time and space. This is reverie or musing."2 The second is voluntary or purposive thought, which is guided by a "distinct

1 Part I, chap. iii.

2 W. James, Psychology, vol. i, p. 583; compare Th. Ribot, Psychology of Attention, chaps. i and ii; Titchener, Feeling and Attention, p. 311.