Friday + Saturday, 12-1 o'clock [March 2, 1805.]
What a sky! the not yet orbed moon, the spotted oval, blue at one edge from the deep utter blue of the sky--a MASS of _pearl_-white cloud below, distant, and travelling to the horizon, but all the upper part of the ascent and all the height such _profound_ blue, deep as a deep river, and deep in colour, and those two depths so entirely _one_, _as_ to give the meaning and explanation of the two different significations of the epithet. Here, so far from _divided_, they were scarcely _distinct_, scattered over with thin pearl-white cloudlets--hands and fingers--the largest not larger than a floating veil! Unconsciously I stretched forth my arms as to embrace the sky, and in a trance I had worshipped God in the moon--the spirit, not the form. I felt in how innocent a feeling Sabeism might have begun. Oh! not only the moon, but the depths of the sky! The moon was the _idea_; but deep sky is, of all visual impressions, the nearest akin to a feeling. It is more a feeling than a sight, or, rather, it is the melting away and entire union of feeling and sight!
Monday morning, which I ought not to have known not to be Sunday night, 2 o'clock, March 4, 1805.
My dreams to-night were interfused with struggle and fear, though, till the very last, not victors; but the very last, which awoke me, was a completed night-mare, as it gave the _idea_ and _sensation_ of actual grasp or touch contrary to _my_ will and in apparent consequence of the malignant will of the external form, whether actually appearing or, as sometimes happened, believed to exist--in which latter case I have two or three times felt a horrid touch of hatred, a grasp, or a weight of hate and horror abstracted from all [conscious] form or supposal of form, an _abstract touch_, an _abstract_ grasp, an _abstract_ weight! _Quam nihil ad genium Papiliane tuum!_ or, in other words, _This Mackintosh would prove to be nonsense by a Scotch smile._ The last [dream], that woke me, though a true night-mare, was, however, a mild one. I cried out early, like a scarcely-hurt child who knows himself within hearing of his mother. But, anterior to this, I had been playing with children, especially with one most lovely child, about two years or two and a half, and had repeated to her, in my dream, "The dews were falling fast," &c., and I was sorely frightened by the sneering and fiendish malignity of the beautiful creature, but from the beginning there had been a terror about it and proceeding from it. I shall hereafter, read the Vision in "Macbeth" with increased admiration.