MENTAL ACTIVITY AND MEMORY.
[To THE EDITOR 01 THE "SPECTATOR.")
find in the Spectator, page 65, on July 8th of this year a brief article which seems to be a statement in regard to some verse dreamed and recovered on awaking. This is a matter which has long interested me, and about which there is here and there something to be found in literature, notably, of course, Knbla Khan and Voltaire's doubtful assertion of the production in sleep of a whole canto of verse.
I send you in this connexion a little book of verse of my own which has not been republished in England. The preface may amuse you with its statement of the pranks of copyright law in this country, but my more immediate object is to call your attention to two sets of verse in the book which were recovered on waking. One of them is entirely unlike anything I ever could have written in daytime.
I have pleasure in stating that I must be one of the oldest subscribers to the Spectator, since in 1862, when yours was one
of the very few papers which took the side of the North in our great Civil War, I began to subscribe to the Spectator, and have continued to read it ever since.—I am, Sir, &c., Bar Harbor, Maine, U.S.A. WEIR MITCHELL.
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