If these words denote pleasures which have no reality, let us no longer use them.[47] The person who, during the twelve hours of every day that he passed in sleep, believed himself clothed with royal authority, shared a lot exactly similar to the king who, dreaming through the same number of hours, imagined that he suffered cold and hunger, and asked the pity of the peasants in the streets.

[145]

All our pleasures are fugitive, and they are all real. That wonderful faculty, the imagination, awakens past pleasures, charms the instant that is flowing, and either veils the future, or embellishes it in the radiance of hope.

Let us banish that vulgar prejudice which represents reason and imagination as two enemies which cannot co?xist. The severest reason ought to disdain no easy and pure pleasures. The happy paintings even of a dream bring joy, until their rainbow hues melt away. The dreams of the imagination have greatly the advantage over those of sleep. Our will gives them birth. We prolong, dissipate and renew them at pleasure.[48] All, who have learned to multiply these happy moments, know, at the same time, how to enjoy these agreeable visions, and paint with enchantment those dreamy hours which they owe to the effervescence of a gay imagination.

There are situations in which reason has no better counsel to give us than to yield ourselves up to those illusions which mingle pleasures with our sufferings. I knew a worthy, but unfortunate man, who passed twenty months in prison. He informed me that, every night, he had a dream, in which he imagined that his wife and children visited him and restored him to liberty. This dream left a remembrance so profound, an emotion so delightful, that he determined to attempt to renew it by day. When evening came, exciting his imagination to its most vigorous action, he endeavored to persuade himself that the moment of the reunion was come. He represented to himself the transport of his wife and the caresses of his children; and he allowed no thought but these delightful visions to occupy his[146] mind until the moment when sleep once more wrapped him in forgetfulness. The habit of concentrating his imagination for this result, he assured me, finally rendered these illusions incredibly vivid and real. He expected night with impatience; and the certainty that the close of day would bring some happy moments, threw over the tedious hours an emotion which mitigated his sufferings.

These charming illusions, in misfortune, resemble those brilliant boreal lights which, in the midst of a night that lasts for weeks, present the image of dawn during the dreary winters of the polar circle. An excitable and vivid faculty, which deceives misfortune, ought to embellish happiness. To the pleasant things we possess, it adds those we desire. By its magic, we renew the hours of which the memory is dear. We taste the pleasures which a distant future promises; and see, at least, the fleeting shadow of those which are passing away.

A gloomy philosopher has told us, that such illusions are the effect of a transient insanity. It seems to me that insane thoughts are those w............