know not what. As is so beauti- ed and explained-all that nature, in her "march of monstrosity," can produce, or that the most fervid and whimsical fancy can create, waking, and with the light of day,-are nothing to those marvellous things that come to the couch of the hypochondriac unbidden, and in the dark. Imagine the whole of the living things, on the earth, in the waters, or in the air, to be hewed into shreds, without being in the least deprived of their vitality, and that these shreds are reeling like leaves and dust in a whirlwind, and constantly changing their forms, their magnitudes, and their combinations, and you have some faint, but very faint, representation of the armies that invade the sleepless couch of this unhappy person. If he could contemplate them as a mere spectator, and with calmness, he might, odd and out of nature as they are, derive some pleasure from the contemplation; but they move at him and not past him. Sometimes they come rolling in heaps; and he starts and shudders at the idea of being buried under a spiritual avalanche; at other times, there opens a vista into the palpable gloom, at the end of which a moving thing makes its appearance. At first, it is small and distant; but it approaches and enlarges, and changes from deformity to deformity, every instant. Now it is a thing with horns and claws fully expressed by Eliphaz the Temanite" a vision is before our face, but we cannot discern the form thereof;" we start, the effect of our labour is gone, and we are as much awake as ever. So struggle we out the weary hours, till the blue light and increasing cold of the dawn throw us into a broken and unsatisfactory slumber, full of dreams of mental terror and worldly disappointment, from which we at last awake, wearied rather than refreshed. Even this is painful and perplexing enough; but it is nothing compared with the suffering of those who are under the infliction of that undefinable malady, which pains all the mind without piercing any part of the body. It is no mitigation of the anguish, though it should be a caveat against it, to say that it is generally the wages of dissipation, of sensual dissipation in many, of mental dissipation in more, and of the two combined in not a few. The anguish is not the less severe that the feeling of it may be dashed with the idea that it might have been avoided; and not the least vexatious part of the case is, that it falls heaviest upon those who have the most merit; is the affliction, not of the sot, but of the man of sensibility; and indeed, as it is a mental affliction, it cannot exist but where there is mind, and the depth and delicacy of that mind are the measures of its morbidity. To such a one, the head is no sooner laid on the pillow, than the "spectre things" are around it. There is no need of slumber to make us dream, or of straining of the invention to find the terrific. The wildest conceits of those sons of the brush, who torture nature and their own imaginations, and combine the most incongruous productions of this world with the most grotesque conceptions of fancy in order to learn the likenesses of the beings of another-the most magic productions of phantasmagoria, and of those illusions of vision, which the science of Optics has at once disclos anon it is a face of the most distorted features, and the most wild and irregular expression-then it passes into a single feature, as an eye which, with nothing but darkness for its socket, fills up half the horizon—and again it is that chaos, which gives the feeling of dissolution; and just as the forehead becomes moist with cold drops, and the horror of annihilation is begun, the tormentor changes to a new monster, or vanishes in thick darkness. If the latter should be the alternative-and over that the victim has no controul-it is an escape, no doubt, but it is not an escape from misery. Reality comes in the room of fiction, and the fevered imagination runs over all the events, and occurrences, and relations of life, consuming merit, rooting out pleasure, and extinguishing hope. The sufferer resembles a mariner, awakening to recollection on the top of a foam-surrounded rock, to which he has been tossed by the power of the billow ;-he is hemmed in, and all around is wreck and desolation; the present is nothing, and, to him, there are no bright points in the past or the future; Conscience stands over the former with whips, and Despair over the latter with scorpions; in the path which he has travelled, he sees his own footprints in all the dark and difficult by ways, while, at every turning, the clear and broad and pleasant way opens for a little, glowing with beauty, and gay with gladness, to the hand that he did not take. To all his friends, he feels that he has been an ingrate, and they appear to have been the same to him; all that has been done seems wrong, and all that is projected useless;-backward there is no consolation, and forward there is no hope;-he feels that he had better not have been, and wishes-aud resolves not to be. If the strength of the constitution can so "wrestle with the fiend," as that one hour or two of such sleep as one in this mood of mind is capable of, can be obtained, the phantoms may vanish, the facts may recover from their distortion, and the sufferer may wake again to a world worth the having; but the exhaustion is great, and if the visitations be frequent, they consume the body and wear out the mind. But should that not be the case,should the torment last out the night, and the spectres not quit the pillow till the patient gets out of bed, the agony continues ;— nor is there any doubt that many of those melancholy "leaps out of life," which are generally supposed to come from an overflowing of passion, and which the Dracos of the dark ages construed into crimes, and made the subjects of punishment-to the poor cold clay! are the results of the ag ony of that sleepless night which is produced by indigestion, often recurring, and unannealed by slumber. All that has been here described, and much more which no words can depict, has been felt, in countless instances, by those who were both well and good in the world,-who had no misfortunes to bar, and no "twitches of the worm” to enbitter, their pleasures ;-but to whom the cup of enjoyment was full, and the moral appetite uncorrupted. When, however, the agony of real guilt mingles with the anguish of the disordered frame,-when the arrow of the Almighty is within," and "the_poison thereof drinketh up the spirit," the uttermost bourne of human woe is touched-there is a torment of which no man, even of ordinary immorality, can guess the depth; and one moment of which is dearly purchased by all the fruits of the most extensive and successful villany that ever was perpetrated. But this darkness and desolation, which annoy the restless, turn disease into gall, and crime into final retribution, may be, and often are, the sources of profit and pleasure. If there be no anxiety for sleep to irritate, no superstitious fear to alarm, no derangement of the system to agonize, and no guilt in the mind to torture, then the sleepless night may become a source of more exquisite intellectual enjoyment than the best selected library, or even the choicest pages in the volume of nature herself. In those creations, elaborations, or workings, whether in the sciences, literature, the inventive part of the arts, or the arrangements of the business of life, in which the materials are all in the mind itself, and where there needs no reference to external things, the silence, the solitude, and the abstraction of the chamber, offer facilities and securities which cannot be obtained during the day; and if recollection will but bring the materials, and remembrance preserve the work, a man may really do more for the furtherance of any purpose that requires thought, in a few quiet hours in bed, than in double the number of eve bustling days. During the day, you cannot shut out the world; and though you could, you would not then be secure against the interruption of your own senses. Hearing, smell, the taste, and the touch, you may controul,-they are passive, as it were, and do not go out after their objects, but wait till these objects come to them. The eye, however, is an active and a wayward thing,-it will look in spite of you, and in spite of you it will sometimes make you abandon your own object, and attend to that which it has selected. It is true that a well-disciplined eye can never seduce us from the action which we are performing, and on the progress and completion of which we are bent; but as we have no material controul over our thoughts-cannot hold them with our fingers, or run after them with our feet-no training of the can give us so much command of it as to prevent it from at times stealing us from the current of our thoughts. But the temptations of our senses of the eye in a peculiar and preeminent manner and degree, are not the only enemies of continued thought to which we are exposed during the day,-they are found in every person or thing in which we have any interest or concern. may have issued the usual and justi. fiable equivoke, by which the harshness of a blunt denial is taken off, "not at home to any body;" the jingle may have come to the bell, or the rat-tat-tat to the knocker, as it happened; and the voice, though secondhand through the medium of either of these instruments, may be that of "the dearest friend we have." We half open the door, in order that we may certify ourself by the sound of his real voice. "Not at home, Sir." "Not at home!" reiterates that mournful tone, which comes for plea sure but finds disappointment; and we cannot resist peeping out by the side of the window blind, to see how it is borne. The very first object we see is the face of "the dearest friend that we have," looking full upon us, with that strange mix One "Life ture of supplication and pity, and reproof and laughter, which so few have the power of resisting. Cogitation is thrown to the dogs. let us cherish;" and farewell to our plans for the day, and to the same train of thought for ever. Should the resolution be able to resist this, and we allow our friend to go, half the mind goes after him, and pulls the resisting half with a force so equal to the resistance, that we are unable to think, and, in all probability, go in quest of him to whom we have been denied. your Even if no friend should break in for the generous purpose of driving away the "biue devils"-to make room for "the black," day may be still fraught with annoyance. The soft voice, or the other voice, of your wife-if you happen to have one-the prattle on the of part children, the horrible news or accidents, the music of the knife-grinder or the hurdygurdy, -a hundred things which you know, and a hundred others that you dream not of, may, each singly, or in all their combinations, drive you from your purpose; and render it utterly imp ssible for you to say when you rise in the morning, and verify the saying when you retire to bed, "to day, I shall think or plan, thus, or thus." In the night, it is far otherwise; for, if you be safe from the music of cats and noses, the rattling of boards, and that hellish monster of the night-an unoiled door turning at its leisure upon its hinges, and returning upon the same, at those slow intervals, whose very slowness makes you hope that each is the last, and thus keeps you in constant suspense between "rise and shut," and "lie still,"-if you escape these, the total absence of bodily exertion, the embargo which darkness lays on the eye, the silence, the solitude, all combine to open largely the floodgates of thought, and pours upon the memory a tide of invention, than the arrangement of which the mind can feel no higher, and taste no sweeter pleasure. Nor is it to be prized on ly for its positive good, but also for the evil that it prevents. Whether continuous thought can be an opiate to the pain of compunction, I will not take upon me to say; but I know, from my own experience, that where it is, restlessness will not come at all, and the blue devils of indigestion are very shy about entering. Therefore, every one should cultivate the powers of nocturnal thought and invention. It is a habit; like all habits, it may be acquired; when once acquired, we need never be idle either by night or by day, and those portions of the night which are pain to the idle, may be rendered the most valuable portions of life,-because never else have we the same constraint over our minds, and the same security against inroads from with out. If we sleep afterwards, it may be that that which we have thought or invented may not be fresh in the memory, or may not, at the time of our awakening, be in the memory at all. That, however, is a matter of minor importance. When once a subject has been elaborated in thought, we never lose it. The storehouse of the mind is safe against both rot and robbers; and whatever we have trusted there is sure to be found when external circumstances render it necessary. Even when we have not the purpose and the connexion, that of which we thought in the silent hours before we slept, comes back to us through the mist of oblivion and dreams, with all the interest, and hallowed by all the charms of the history of that which ages ago had ceased to exist, and of which the pleasure is now wholly intellectual. CROSSING THE LINE. "THERE it is at last," said the midshipman of the watch to a young Irish cadet, who was standing near him on the poop of an outwardbound East Indiaman: "there it is at last."-"What is it?" asked the young soldier. "The line, to be sure-the equinoctial line, which we have all been so anxiously looking out for." "Ah, now-sure you don't mane to persuade me that you can see it ?" "Take my glass then, and look out yonder, about a point on the lee-bow, and persuade yourself whether you can see it or not." The young Irishman had no sooner put his eye to the tube, than he exclaimed, "Sure and there is a line yonder; I do not see it without the glass, but it cannot be very far off." "No, it is not very far off," said the Mid, laughing heartily; "it is all in your eye, Pat. Do you remember the story of the fly on the clergyman's spectacles? Look at the glass."-On examination Pat found a hair sticking horizontal ly across the lower lens of the teles cope which had been fixed there by the mischievous Mid. The sun was just setting-the clouds were tinged with all the gor geous hues of a tropical sky, assuming every variety of strange and grotesque appearances, and the water reflected back the image of the heavens, if possible, with increased splendour. As far as the eye could reach, nothing was visible but the glassy, undulating surface of the sea, tremulously rippled here and there under the partial influence of the cat's paws, which played over it. The ship was gliding slowly over the smooth expanse of water—her large sails flapping heavily against the masts as the sea rose and fell, and her smaller canvass just swelling with the breeze, and lending its feeble aid to urge her onwards. Groups of passengers were lounging up and down the quarter-deck and poop, or leaning over the hammock nettings, * Light and fitful airs. * admiring the beauties of the evening, while the ship's musicians were doing all in their power to murder time and harmony for their amusement. The seamen were in high glee, for the quarter-master had heard the officer of the forenoon watch report the latitude at noon to the Captain 20' N.; and they knew that Neptune would soon make his appearance. Just as the increasing dusk of evening began to render objects indistinct and obscure, the look-out on the forecastle called out, "A light right ahead, Sir!" "Very well, my boy; keep your eye upon it, and let me know if we near it," said the officer of the deck. In a short time the man exclaimed, "The light is close aboard of us, Sir ;" and immediately a loud confused roaring noise was heard, and a Stentorian voice bawled out, "Ho! the ship ahoy!" "Hollo!" said the officer. "What ship is that?" "The Heavitree." "What! my old friend Captain Blowhard? He is welcome back again. Tell him his old friend Neptune means to pay him a visit to-morrow at 10 o'clock, and hopes he will warn his children to have their chins in readiness for his razor. Good night." "Good night." -"Won't you go forward and see Neptune's car," said the young Mid, to our friend Pat; it is worth your while to look at the old boy whisking along at the tail of half a score of dolphins, with a poop-light, as big as the full moon, blazing over his stern: you can see him quite plain from the forecastle." "Sure, I'll go see the fun whatever it is," said Pat, and off they ran, followed by about a dozen of the poop loungers,-the reefer suddenly disappearing under the galley-deck, while the cads rushed up on the forecastle, where they had hardly effected a safe landing, when splash-splash-splash--bucket after bucket of water came thundering down upon their heads from the foretop; and loud shouts of laughter from all parts of the ship indicated the general joy at witnessing the astonishment and discomfiture of the gulpins. In the meantime, Neptune's 23 ATHENEUM, VOL. 9, 2d series. car, in the shape of a lighted tar-barrel, went slowly astern, casting an unsteady flickering light on the sails and rigging as it passed and was seen floating in the ship's wake, till its dwindling flame disappeared in the distance, like a star sinking beneath the horizon. The character of the scene was completely altered since the final disappearance of the sun below the horizon. A brilliant moon shone clearly in a bright and cloudless sky, her bright beams riding on a path of liquid silver over the sea, while the gigantic shadow of the ship seemed to be skimming its way through the myriads of glittering stars, reflected from the thickly-studded heaven. No sooner were the decks washed in the morning, than the "active note of preparation" was heard among the eager sailors, who had been for weeks anticipating the pleasures of that day. The jolly-boat was taken down from the booms, and placed at the gangway; all the pumps in the ship were set in motion, the scuppers choked to prevent the escape of the water, and in a very short time the whole deck was afloat; while the jolly-boat, full to the gunwale, was ready to answer the purpose of a comfortable bathing-tub, and a party-coloured pole erected over it, with a sign purporting that this was Neptune's easy shavingshop. A screen was drawn across the fore-part of the waist, to conceal the operations of the actors in the approaching ceremony. All was bustle and animation: the carpenter's gang converting an old gun-carriage into a triumphal car; the gunner preparing flags for its decoration; his mate busy with his paint-brush bedaubing the tars who were to act as sea-horses; and the charioteer preparing and putting on Neptune's livery. At length all was ready for the reception of the king of the sea. "On deck there!" cried the man at the mast-head. "Hollo," replied the officer of the watch. "A strange sail in sight, right ahead, Sir." "Very well, my boy, can you make |