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These secret and unavowed alliances transfigure the unlovely streets, and light in the cavernous blank houses many a glowing and familiar hearth. As he goes on, careless of distance or direction, he is now inwardly busy with fresh and delightful dreams. He plights his troth and earth is Eden; he imagines brilliant hours for the dream-children who go by his side, holding each of his hands.
It was Lamb, and not Coleridge, who wrote 'Dream-Children: a Reverie': 'Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W n; and as much as children could understand, I explained to them what coyness and difficulty and denial meant in maidens when, suddenly turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of representment that I became in doubt which of them stood before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding and still receding, till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech.
It pleased her imagination to take the place of that phantom mother, herself a phantom mother. And who knows but that such dream-children, as she called those two little girls, were more satisfactory in the end than real children? They represented, so to say, the poetry of children. Had Margaret been a real mother, there would have been the prose of children as well.
Plumer's death in 1778, but the eldest son, William Plumer, moved at once to Gilston, a few miles east of Blakesware, a mansion which for a long time was confused with Blakesware by commentators on Lamb. Field and the servants under her. Mrs. Field became thus practically mistress of it, as Lamb says in "Dream-Children." Hence the increased happiness of her grandchildren when they visited her.
Charles Lamb's "Dream-Children; A Revery," which, although it is numbered among the "Essays of Elia," may be regarded as a short-story, is important mainly because of the nature of the man who penned it, a man who, in an age infected with the fever of growing up, remained at heart a little child, looking upon the memorable world with eyes of wonder.
Charles Lamb's "Dream-Children; A Revery," which, although it is numbered among the "Essays of Elia," may be regarded as a short-story, is important mainly because of the nature of the man who penned it, a man who, in an age infected with the fever of growing up, remained at heart a little child, looking upon the memorable world with eyes of wonder.
Do the humorous ecclesiastics and scholarly tutors who profess to understand Elia ever peep into that Essay called "Witches," or that other Essay called "A Child-Angel"? There are things here that are written for a very different circle. Certain sentences in "Dream-children," too, have a beauty that takes a natural man's breath completely away.
There the Twelve Cæsars are spoken of as hanging on the wall, as if they were medallions; but Mr. E.S. Bowlby tells me that he perfectly remembers the Twelve Cæsars at Gilston, about 1850, as busts, just as Lamb says. See also notes to "The Last Peach," Vol. I., to "Dream-Children" in this volume, and to "Going or Gone," Vol.
Mary's description of the old house should be compared with Charles's in the Elia essays "Blakesmoor in H shire" and "Dream-Children." In one point they are at variance; for Mary says that the twelve Cæsars "hung" round the hall, and her brother that they were life-size busts.
The theory that Lamb's grandmother, Mrs. Field, was the original Mrs. Battle, does not, I think, commend itself, although that lady may have lent a trait or two. It has possibly arisen from the relation of the passage in the essay on Blakesware, where Mrs. Battle is said to have died in the haunted room, to that in "Dream-Children," where Lamb says that Mrs. Field occupied this room.
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