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 developement 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;[35] they become A portion of ourselves as of our time, 10 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 shake us with the vision that's gone by,[36] 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 20 With beings brighter than have been, and give A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.[37] 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.[38]