Poetical Fragments from Ethel Churchill Volume I/The Visionary and the True

by Letitia Elizabeth Landon

CHAPTER X.

Ah! waking dreams, that mock the day,
    Have other ends than those
That come beneath the moonlight ray,
    And charm the eyes they close.

The vision, colouring the night,
    'Mid bloom and brightness wakes,
Banished by morning's cheerful light,
    Which brightens what it breaks.

But dreams, which fill the waking eye
    With deeper spells than sleep,
When hours unnumbered pass us by;
    From such we wake and weep.

We wake, but not to sleep again,
    The heart has lost its youth;
The morning light that wakes us then,
    Cold, calm, and stern, is truth.

Blanchard’s title is:

THE VISIONARY AND THE TRUE

In The New York Mirror (24th February 1838), as Waking Dreams