Whatsoever is harmonically composed, delights in harmony, which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all church music.  For myself, not only from my obedience, but my particular genius, I do embrace it:  for even that vulgar and tavern music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion and a profound contemplation of the First Composer; there is something in it of divinity more than the ear discovers:  it is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world and creatures of God; such a melody to the ear as the whole world, well understood, would afford the understanding.  In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God.  It unties the ligaments of my frame, takes me to pieces, dilates me out of myself, and by degrees, methinks, resolves me into heaven.  I will not say, with Plato, the soul is an harmony, but harmonical, and hath its nearest sympathy unto music; thus some, whose temper of body agrees and humors the constitution of their souls, are born poets, though indeed all are naturally inclined unto rhythm.

There is surely a nearer apprehension of anything that delights us in our dreams than in our waked senses:  without this, I were unhappy; for my awaked judgment discontents me, ever whispering unto me that I am from my friend; but my friendly dreams in the night requite me, and make me think I am within his arms.  I thank God for my happy dreams, as I do for my good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happiness; and surely it is not a melancholy conceit to think we are all asleep in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as mere dreams to those of the next; as the phantasms of the night to the conceits of the day.  There is an equal delusion in both, and the one doth but seem to be the emblem or picture of the other; we are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps, and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul.  It is the ligation of sense, but the liberty of reason; and our waking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps.  At my nativity my ascendant was the watery sign of Scorpius; I was born in the planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a piece of that leaden planet in me.  I am no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company; yet in one dream I can compose a whole comedy, behold the action, and apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceits thereof.  Were my memory as faithful as my reason is then fruitful, I would never study but in my dreams, and this time also would I choose for my devotions; but our grosser memories have then so little hold of our abstracted understandings that they forget the story, and can only relate to our awaked souls a confused and broken tale of that that hath passed.  Aristotle, who hath written a singular tract of sleep, hath not, methinks, thoroughly defined