Lovel's was disturbed by a thousand baseless and confused visions.

He was a bird--he was a fish--or he flew like the one, and swam like the other,--qualities which would have been very essential to his safety a few hours before.

Then Miss Wardour was a syren, or a bird of Paradise; her father a triton, or a sea-gull; and Oldbuck alternately a porpoise and a cormorant.

These agreeable imaginations were varied by all the usual vagaries of a feverish dream;--the air refused to bear the visionary, the water seemed to burn him--the rocks felt like down pillows as he was dashed against them--whatever he undertook, failed in some strange and unexpected manner--and whatever attracted his attention, underwent, as he attempted to investigate it, some wild and wonderful metamorphosis, while his mind continued all the while in some degree conscious of the delusion, from which it in vain struggled to free itself by awaking;--feverish symptoms all, with which those who are haunted by the night-hag, whom the learned call Ephialtes, are but too well acquainted.

At length these crude phantasmata arranged themselves into something more regular, if indeed the imagination of Lovel, after he awoke (for it was by no means the faculty in which his mind was least rich), did not gradually, insensibly, and unintentionally, arrange in better order the scene of which his sleep presented, it may be, a less distinct outline.