DOZING.

"Dozing very much delights."

Our corporeal machinery requires an occasional relaxation, as much as

the steam engine does the application of oil to its divers springs; and,

after a _bonâ fide_ slumber, we rise with a freshness equal to that of

flowers in the best regulated flower-pots. But dozing must not be

confounded with legitimate sleep, though frequently tending to the same

purpose; it may be termed an embryo slumber, that entertaineth the body

with the most quiescent gentleness, acting on our senses as a sort of

mental warm bath; till, finally, the "material man" himself luxuriates

in tepidity.

Nothing can be more ungodly than to enter the church with an express

purpose of dozing there. Arm-chairs, sofas, and beds are the legitimate

places for dozers. But there is no accounting for that conquering spirit

of all-besetting drowsiness that attacks us at sundry times and places.

It is in vain that we lengthen our limbs into an awakening stretch--that

we yawn with the expressive suavity of yawning no more--that we

dislocate our knuckle bones, and ruffle the symmetry of our visage, with

a manual application; like the cleft blaze of a candle, drowsiness

returns again. Well, then, what manner of reader is he that hath never

sinned by drowsing in church time? Let him read on; and I'll realize by

description what he has realized by endurance.

It is after the embodying of a good dinner with ourselves, that doziness

is most tempting. You have dined at four o'clock to-day. Well, that's a

decent Sabbatical hour. After due potations of wine, coffee, &c. your

gratitude is awakened; and, like a good Christian, you arrange your

beaver, and walk off steadily to church. Now, remember, I give you full

credit for your wish to exhibit your external holiness--that you are

indeed conscious of the reverence that should accompany all your

engagements in the fane of the Deity; and yet I prognosticate that if

the Rev. Nabob Narcotic happen to preach this evening, you will, of a

surety, doze--infallibly doze--in the midst of his sermon!

'Tis a summer month, and the very church windows seem labouring with a

fit perspiration. Horribly boring--isn't it? How your hat clings to your

moistened forehead, and the warm gloves droop from your fingers, like

roasting chicken! Get as much room as possible; tenderly pass little

miss there, and her unbreeched brother, over to their smiling mamma. Now

you have the balmy corner to yourself! "Psalms," first lesson--second

ditto--prayers--thanksgivings--all reverently attended to; there is a

little dreaminess settling on your lids--your lips begin to close with

languor; but you have not dozed. Let's hear the sermon. You are seated

with tolerable erectness; and, judging from the steady determination of

your eyebrows, one would imagine that your eyes would be open for the

whole of the discourse. But, alas! 'tis Mr. Narcotic, whose spectacled

nose is just verging above the crimson horizon of his pulpit.--"Awake,

thou that sleepest!" Why, the text is quite opposed to DOZINESS! But

what of this, if the preacher be addicted to drawling, the weather

unobligingly sultry, and you yourself have gradually been dwindling from

an uncongenial state of wakefulness into a sleepy calm? 'Tis too much

for beldame Nature, believe me!

I perceive that you have rubbed the bridge of your nose several

times--that you have tried to swell forth your eyes with a full round

stare at the parson; but your stoicism "profiteth nothing." The sermon

is irreligiously long; and you are nodding--in a doze! Whether there be

much pleasure in a church doze, I am not presuming enough to determine.

For myself, I have found nothing more tantalizing than the endeavour to

restrain from an occasioned doze during church time. After a certain

period, I have perceived the parson diminishing, like a phantasmagoric

image--all the ladies' black bonnets sinking away, like a cluster of

clouds--and (shame on the confession!) I have performed head worship to

the front of my seat, instead of keeping an immovable post-like

position, before his reverence. However, a church doze is seldom admired

by the wakeful. Should an embryo snore escape from one's nose (and this

is possible,) some old grandam, or an upright piece of masculine

sanctity, is sure to rouse you; the former will either _hem_ you into

awakening shame, or drop her prayer-book on the floor; the latter will

most likely thump the same with the imperative tip of his boot. How

horridly stupid one seems after being aroused! The woman eyes you with

the most piquant, self-justifying sneer possible; while all her little

IMMACULATES, if she have any, look at you like so many hissing young

turkey cocks; and as for the man--bless his holiness!--he'd frown you

down to Hades at once.

"My heart leaps up" when I behold a stage coach--that snug, panel

painted, comfortable wheel-whirling "thing of life." O ye days of

juvenilian sensibilities--ye eye-feeding, heart-rising scenes of

remembered felicity!--how glorious was the coach at the school door! The

whip--Ajax _Mastigoferos_ never had such a powerful one as the modern

Jehu! The spokes of the wheels--they were handled with admiring fingers!

That Jupiter-like throne, the coach-box--who would not have risked his

neck to have been seated on it? When all was "right," how eloquent the

lip-music of coachee! how fine the introductory frisks of the horses'

tails, and the arching plunge of the fore-foot--no rainbow-curve ever

was so beauteous! "Oh, happy days! who would not be a boy again?" But

away with my puerilities. I intend the reader to take a doze in that

comfortable repository for the person--the inside of a coach.

With all the reckless simplicity of boyhood, I maintain that travelling

by coach is by no means the least of our sublunary pleasures. Man is a

_wheelable_ animal as well as walking one. Winter is the time for a nice

inside jaunt. What divine evaporations from the coachman's muzzle! What

a joyous creak in the down-flying steps!--and, oh! that comfortable

alertness with which we deposit ourselves in the padded corner, and fold

our coatflaps over our knees, glance at the frosty steam of the window;

and then, quite _à la Tityre_, repose our recumbent bodies at our ease!

Such moments as these are snatches of indefinable bliss. It would appear

probable, that a coach was a very inconvenient place for a doze; the

attendant bustle, the whip-smacks, bickering wheels, and

untranquillizing jolts--

"Like angels' visits, few and far between,"--

are not calculated for sleepiness. Notwithstanding these correlative

interruptions, a doze in the coach is by no means uncommon, even in the

daytime. Let us examine this a little more intellectually.

Suppose a man is returning to his friends, with a mind composed, and

"all his business settled." (By-the-by, how vastly comprehensive this

speech is!) Suppose he has entered the coach about four in the

afternoon, and, by rare luck, finds he is, for the present, the only

inside passenger. Such a man, I say, will be likely to doze before

twenty miles have run under the coach-wheels--speaking _Hibernicè_. For

the last half-hour, he will be thinking of himself--how many commissions

he has performed--how many he has left undone--and how many he intends

to do. The next, he will probably give to his home attractions--his

anxious wife, sat musingly round the tea-table--his favourite son George

(so like his father)--and all the nine hundred and ninety-nine pretty

nothings we hear of, after a brief absence. These will send his heart a

long way from the coach, and therefore keep him in the full enjoyment of

wakefulness. But this train of delectable musing is by no means

exhaustless. The roll of the wheels gradually becomes naturalized to the

ear, and the body moves in sympathy with the coach; the road gets very

monotonously barren; the lounge in the corner--how suitable then to this

solitary languor! Lulled here, the traveller for awhile admires the

leathern trappings of the coach, hums a tune perhaps, and affects a

dubious whistle. Meantime the operations of _doziness_ have been gently

applying themselves. His eye is sated with the road and the coach; his

hands become stationary on his lap; his feet supinely rested on the

opposite seat; his head instinctively motions to the corner--and he

dozes! A doze in the coach is the flower of dozes, when you are alone.

There, you may twist your person into any shape you please, without the

fear of discomposing a silken dress, or a nursemaid's petticoats. No

boisterous arguments from snuff-taking sexagenarians: all is placid

--Eden-like--just as a dozer's _sanctorum_ ought to be! The only thing

attendant on the doze of an inside passenger, is the great chance of

being suddenly aroused by the entrance of company. O tell me, ye of the

fine nerve, what is more vexing than to be startled from your nest by

the creaking slam of the steps, the bleak winter gales galloping along

your face, and a whole bundle of human beings pushing themselves into

your retreat! There is no rose without its thorn, as myriads have said

before me:--

----"O beate Sexti,

Vitæ summa brevis SPEM nos vetat inchoare LONGAM!"

Not all the morose sarcasms of Johnson, on the pleasures of rural life,

have ever weakened my capability for enjoying it at convenient

intervals. His antipathy to the country resembled his contempt for

blank-verse--_he_ could not enjoy it. I have now moped away a

considerable number of months in this city of all things--this--this

London. "Well?" Pray restrain yourself, reader; I am coming to the point

in due season. During my metropolitan existence--although I am neither a

tailor, nor any trade, nor anything exactly--I have never beheld a

downright intellectual-looking blade of grass. I mean much by an

intellectual blade of grass. The Londoners--poor conceited

creatures!--have denominated sundry portions of their Babylon "fields."

But--I ask it in all the honest pride of sheer ignorance--is there the

ghost even of a bit of grass to be seen in many of them? I cannot easily

forget my vexation, when, after a tedious walk to one of those

misnomered "fields," I found nothing but a weather-beaten, muggy, smoky

assemblage of houses of all sizes, circumscribed by appropriate filth

and abundant cabbage-stumps. Innocent of London quackeries, I strolled

forth with the full hope of laying me down on a velvet carpet of

grass--the birds carolling around me--and, perchance, a flock of

lambkins, tunefully baying to their mammas!! "Said I to myself," when I

reached these fields, "what a fool I am!" I had contemplated a doze on

the grass.

But leaving all thoughts of disappointment, who will not allow that

there is something exceedingly delightful in dozing calmly beneath the

shade of an o'er-arching tree?

----"recubans sub tegmine fagi."

Of course, the weather should be fine, to admit of this luxurious

idleness. Let the blue-bosomed clouds be sailing along, like Peter

Bell's boat; let the sunbeams be gilding the face of nature, and tinging

the landscape with multiform hues; let the breezes be gentle, the spot

retired, and the heart at ease. Now, go and stretch yourself on the

grassy couch, while the branches of an aged tree shadow forth the imaged

leaves around you. What a congenial situation for philosophy--under an

old tree, on a sunny summer day! How much more becoming than the

immortal tub of the sour-minded Diogenes? Who will be able to refrain

from philosophizing. I repeat it, beneath such an old tree? 'Tis at such

times that the heart spontaneously unbends itself--that the fancy

tranquillizes its thoughts--and that memory awakens her

----"treasured pictures of a thousand scenes."

Place the palms of your hands beneath your pole, and survey the

skies!--calm, beautifully unconscious! By-gone times, and by-gone

friends--the thousand commingling scenes of varied life--how they all

recur to you now! You fancy you could lie beneath the tree for

eternity--so soothing is the employment of doing nothing--or field

philosophy! Yet, to speak correctly, you are doing a great deal; your

imagination is flying in all directions--from the death of Caesar to the

last cup of Congou that you took with a regretted friend. What a mystery

your existence is! The world turns round as gently as ever; the flowers

bud into life; and the winter nips them. Man lives, thinks, and dies.

All very wondrous truisms. Well, after a half-hour--or perchance

more--you will be gradually relapsing into a state of soporific

nothing-at-all-ness (the best word I can find to express my meaning.)

May there be some clear little stream just behind you, laughing along

its idle way;--some chirping birds, singing their roundelay--some

buzzing flies--you will then be lulled into doziness. However, with or

without the purling murmur of the brook--the joyous warbling of the

birds--the busy bustling flies--you will not be able to resist the

dozing temptations that will steal over you. Your eyes will close gently

as flower-leaflets--your thoughts die away in a heavenly confusion--and

then you doze!--neither sleeping nor waking, but absolved in delicious

dreaminess! O, for such a doze!--_Monthly Magazine_.

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THE SELECTOR,

AND LITERARY NOTICES OF NEW WORKS.

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