From my own Apartment.

After the lassitude of a day spent in the strolling manner, which is usual with men of pleasure in this town, and with a head full of a million of impertinences, which had danced round it for ten hours together, I came to my lodging, and hastened to bed.  My valet-de-chambre[147] knows my University trick of reading there; and he being:  a good scholar for a gentleman, ran over the names of Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, and others, to know which I would have.  “Bring Virgil,” said I, “and if I fall asleep, take care of the candle.”  I read the sixth book over with the most exquisite delight, and had gone half through it a second time, when the pleasing ideas of Elysian Fields, deceased worthies walking in them, sincere lovers enjoying their languishment without pain, compassion for the unhappy spirits who had misspent their short daylight, and were exiled from the seats of bliss for ever; I say, I was deep again in my reading, when this mixture of images had taken place of all others in my imagination before, and lulled me into a dream, from which I am just awake, to my great disadvantage.  The happy mansions of Elysium by degrees seemed to be wafted from me, and the very traces of my late waking thoughts began to fade away, when I was cast by a sudden whirlwind upon an island, encompassed with a roaring and troubled sea, which shaked its very centre, and rocked its inhabitants as in a cradle.  The islanders lay on their faces, without offering to look up, or hope for preservation; all her harbours were crowded with mariners, and tall vessels of war lay in danger of being driven to pieces on her shores.  “Bless me!” said I, “why have I lived in such a manner that the convulsion of nature should be so terrible to me, when I feel in myself, that the better part of me is to survive it?  Oh! may that be in happiness.”  A sudden shriek, in which the whole people on their faces joined, interrupted my soliloquy, and turned my eyes and attention to the object which had given us that sudden start, in the midst of an inconsolable and speechless affliction.  Immediately the winds grew calm, the waves subsided, and the people stood up, turning their faces upon a magnificent pile in the midst of the island.  There we beheld an hero of a comely and erect aspect, but pale and languid, sitting under a canopy of state.  By the faces and dumb sorrow of those who attended we thought him in the article of death.  At a distance sat a lady, whose life seemed to hang upon the same thread with his:  she kept her eyes fixed upon him, and seemed to smother ten thousand thousand nameless things, which urged her tenderness to clasp him in her arms:  but her greatness of spirit overcame those sentiments, and gave her power to forbear disturbing his last moment; which immediately approached.  The hero looked up with an air of negligence, and satiety of being, rather than of pain to leave it; and leaning back his head, expired.[148]