The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived.  Of this, at least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind.  A thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions of the mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil, and that they are but waiting to be revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn.

In the early stage of my malady the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural; and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds.  To architecture succeeded dreams of lakes and silvery expanses of water.  The waters then changed their character—­from translucent lakes shining like mirrors they now became seas and oceans.

And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll through many months, promised an abiding torment; and, in fact, it never left me until the winding up of my case.  Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically, nor with any special power of tormenting.  But now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself.  Perhaps some part of my London life might be answerable for this.  Be that as it may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces upturned to the heavens—­faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries; my agitation was infinite, my mind tossed and surged with the ocean.

V.—­The Monster-Haunted Dreamer

I know not whether others share in my feelings on this point; but I have often thought that if I were compelled to forego England and to live in China, and among Chinese manners and modes of life and scenery, I should go mad.  Southern Asia in general is the seat of awful images and associations.  As the cradle of the human race, it would alone have a dim and reverential feeling connected with it.  But there are other reasons.  No man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, and capricious superstitions of Africa, or of savage tribes elsewhere, affect him in the way that he is affected by the ancient, monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions of Indostan, etc.  The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories, modes of faith, etc., is so impressive that, to me, the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual.  A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed.