He discovered that the epithet black was not suitable; “I again fell asleep, and in a dream I read in Strabo that the sand of Ethiopia and Arabia is extremely white, and this morning I have found the place.  You see what learned dreams I have.”

But incidents of this nature are not peculiar to this great bard.  The improvvisatori poets, we are told, cannot sleep after an evening’s effusion; the rhymes are still ringing in their ears, and imagination, if they have any, will still haunt them.  Their previous state of excitement breaks into the calm of sleep; for, like the ocean, when its swell is subsiding, the waves still heave and beat.  A poet, whether a Milton or a Blackmore, will ever find that his muse will visit his “slumbers nightly.”  His fate is much harder than that of the great minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who on retiring to rest could throw aside his political intrigues with his clothes; but Sir Robert, to judge by his portrait and anecdotes of him, had a sleekiness and good-humour, and an unalterable equanimity of countenance, not the portion of men of genius:  indeed one of these has regretted that his sleep was so profound as not to be interrupted by dreams; from a throng of fantastic ideas he imagined that he could have drawn new sources of poetic imagery.  The historian DE THOU was one of those great literary characters who, all his life, was preparing to write the history which he afterwards composed; omitting nothing in his travels and his embassies, which went to the formation of a great man.  DE THOU has given a very curious account of his dreams.  Such was his passion for study, and his ardent admiration of the great men whom he conversed with, that he often imagined in his sleep that he was travelling in Italy, Germany, and in England, where he saw and consulted the learned, and examined their curious libraries.  He had all his lifetime these literary dreams, but more particularly in his travels they reflected these images of the day.

If memory do not chain down these hurrying fading children of the imagination, and

  Snatch the faithless fugitives to light

with the beams of the morning, the mind suddenly finds itself forsaken and solitary.[A] ROUSSEAU has uttered a complaint on this occasion.  Full of enthusiasm, he devoted to the subject of his thoughts, as was his custom, the long sleepless intervals of his nights.  Meditating in bed with his eyes closed, he turned over his periods in a tumult of ideas; but when he rose and had dressed, all was vanished; and when he sat down to his breakfast he had nothing to write.  Thus genius has its vespers and its vigils, as well as its matins, which we have been so often told are the true hours of its inspiration; but every hour may be full of inspiration for him who knows to meditate.  No man was more practised in this art of the mind than POPE, and even the night was not an unregarded portion of his poetical existence, not less than with