what subtile art of tracing the mental processes it is effected, we
are not philosophers enough to explain, but in that wonderful episode
of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money God appears first in the
lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes the
god of all the treasures of the world; and has a daughter, Ambition,
before whom all the world kneels for favours--with the Hesperian
fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing his hands vainly,
but not impertinently, in the same stream--that we should be at one
moment in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, at the next at the
forge of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in hell, all at once, with
the shifting mutations of the most rambling dream, and our judgment
yet all the time awake, and neither able nor willing to detect the
fallacy,--is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet
in his widest seeming-aberrations.

It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the mind's
conceptions in sleep; it is, in some sort--but what a copy! Let the
most romantic of us, that has been entertained all night with the
spectacle of some wild and magnificent vision, recombine it in the
morning, and try it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so
shifting, and yet so coherent, while that faculty was passive, when
it comes under cool examination, shall appear so reasonless and so
unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded; and to have
taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. But the transitions
in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most extravagant
dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them.