What a singular moment is the first one, when you have hardly begun to
recollect yourself, after starting from midnight slumber! By unclosing
your eyes so suddenly you seem to have surprised the personages of your
dream in full convocation round your bed, and catch one broad glance at
them before they can flit into obscurity. Or, to vary the metaphor, you
find yourself for a single instant wide awake in that realm of
illusions whither sleep has been the passport, and behold its ghostly
inhabitants and wondrous scenery with a perception of their strangeness
such as you never attain while the dream is undisturbed. The distant
sound of a church-clock is borne faintly on the wind. You question with
yourself, half seriously, whether it has stolen to your waking ear from
some gray tower that stood within the precincts of your dream. While
yet in suspense another clock flings its heavy clang over the
slumbering town with so full and distinct a sound, and such a long
murmur in the neighboring air, that you are certain it must proceed
from the steeple at the nearest corner; You count the strokes—one, two;
and there they cease with a booming sound like the gathering of a third
stroke within the bell.
If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of the whole night, it
would be this. Since your sober bedtime, at eleven, you have had rest
enough to take off the pressure of yesterday’s fatigue, while before
you, till the sun comes from “Far Cathay” to brighten your window,
there is almost the space of a summer night—one hour to be spent in
thought with the mind’s eye half shut, and two in pleasant dreams, and
two in that strangest of enjoyments the forgetfulness alike of joy and
woe. The moment of rising belongs to another period of time, and
appears so distant that the plunge out of a warm bed into the frosty
air cannot yet be anticipated with dismay. Yesterday has already
vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged
from the future. You have found an intermediate space where the
business of life does not intrude, where the passing moment lingers and
becomes truly the present; a spot where Father Time, when he thinks
nobody is watching him, sits down by the wayside to take breath. Oh
that he would fall asleep and let mortals live on without growing
older!
Hitherto you have lain perfectly still, because the slightest motion
would dissipate the fragments of your slumber. Now, being irrevocably
awake, you peep through the half-drawn window-curtain, and observe that
the glass is ornamented with fanciful devices in frost-work, and that
each pane presents something like a frozen dream. There will be time
enough to trace out the analogy while waiting the summons to breakfast.
Seen through the clear portion of the glass where the silvery
mountain-peaks of the frost-scenery do not ascend, the most conspicuous
object is the steeple, the white spire of which directs you to the
wintry lustre of the firmament. You may almost distinguish the figures
on the clock that has just told the hour. Such a frosty sky and the
snow-covered roofs and the long vista of the frozen street, all white,
and the distant water hardened into rock, might make you shiver even
under four blankets and a woollen comforter. Yet look at that one
glorious star! Its beams are distinguishable from all the rest, and
actually cast the shadow of the casement on the bed with a radiance of
deeper hue than moonlight, though not so accurate an outline.
You sink down and muffle your head in the clothes, shivering all the
while, but less from bodily chill than the bare idea of a polar
atmosphere. It is too cold even for the thoughts to venture abroad. You
speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed like an
oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction, and
drowsily conscious of nothing but delicious warmth such as you now feel
again. Ah! that idea has brought a hideous one in its train. You think
how the dead are lying in their cold shrouds and narrow coffins through
the drear winter of the grave, and cannot persuade your fancy that they
neither shrink nor shiver when the snow is drifting over their little
hillocks and the bitter blast howls against the door of the tomb. That
gloomy thought will collect a gloomy multitude and throw its complexion
over your wakeful hour.
In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the
lights, the music and revelry, above may cause us to forget their
existence and the buried ones or prisoners whom they hide. But
sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung
wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive
sensibility, but no active strength—when the imagination is a mirror
imparting vividness to all ideas without the power of selecting or
controlling them—then pray that your griefs may slumber and the
brotherhood of remorse not break their chain. It is too late. A funeral
train comes gliding by your bed in which passion and feeling assume
bodily shape and things of the mind become dim spectres to the eye.
There is your earliest sorrow, a pale young mourner wearing a sister’s
likeness to first love, sadly beautiful, with a hallowed sweetness in
her melancholy features and grace in the flow of her sable robe. Next
appears a shade of ruined loveliness with dust among her golden hair
and her bright garments all faded and defaced, stealing from your
glance with drooping head, as fearful of reproach: she was your fondest
hope, but a delusive one; so call her Disappointment now. A sterner
form succeeds, with a brow of wrinkles, a look and gesture of iron
authority; there is no name for him unless it be Fatality—an emblem of
the evil influence that rules your fortunes, a demon to whom you
subjected yourself by some error at the outset of life, and were bound
his slave for ever by once obeying him. See those fiendish lineaments
graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that
living eye, the pointed finger touching the sore place in your heart!
Do you remember any act of enormous folly at which you would blush even
in the remotest cavern of the earth? Then recognize your shame.
Pass, wretched band! Well for the wakeful one if, riotously miserable,
a fiercer tribe do not surround him—the devils of a guilty heart that
holds its hell within itself. What if Remorse should assume the
features of an injured friend? What if the fiend should come in woman’s
garments with a pale beauty amid sin and desolation, and lie down by
your side? What if he should stand at your bed’s foot in the likeness
of a corpse with a bloody stain upon the shroud? Sufficient without
such guilt is this nightmare of the soul, this heavy, heavy sinking of
the spirits, this wintry gloom about the heart, this indistinct horror
of the mind blending itself with the darkness of the chamber.
By a desperate effort you start upright, breaking from a sort of
conscious sleep and gazing wildly round the bed, as if the fiends were
anywhere but in your haunted mind. At the same moment the slumbering
embers on the hearth send forth a gleam which palely illuminates the
whole outer room and flickers through the door of the bedchamber, but
cannot quite dispel its obscurity. Your eye searches for whatever may
remind you of the living world. With eager minuteness you take note of
the table near the fireplace, the book with an ivory knife between its
leaves, the unfolded letter, the hat and the fallen glove. Soon the
flame vanishes, and with it the whole scene is gone, though its image
remains an instant in your mind’s eye when darkness has swallowed the
reality. Throughout the chamber there is the same obscurity as before,
but not the same gloom within your breast.
As your head falls back upon the pillow you think—in a whisper be it
spoken—how pleasant in these night solitudes would be the rise and fall
of a softer breathing than your own, the slight pressure of a tenderer
bosom, the quiet throb of a purer heart, imparting its peacefulness to
your troubled one, as if the fond sleeper were involving you in her
dream. Her influence is over you, though she have no existence but in
that momentary image. You sink down in a flowery spot on the borders of
sleep and wakefulness, while your thoughts rise before you in pictures,
all disconnected, yet all assimilated by a pervading gladsomeness and
beauty. The wheeling of gorgeous squadrons that glitter in the sun is
succeeded by the merriment of children round the door of a schoolhouse
beneath the glimmering shadow of old trees at the corner of a rustic
lane. You stand in the sunny rain of a summer shower, and wander among
the sunny trees of an autumnal wood, and look upward at the brightest
of all rainbows overarching the unbroken sheet of snow on the American
side of Niagara. Your mind struggles pleasantly between the dancing
radiance round the hearth of a young man and his recent bride and the
twittering flight of birds in spring about their new-made nest. You
feel the merry bounding of a ship before the breeze, and watch the
tuneful feet of rosy girls as they twine their last and merriest dance
in a splendid ball-room, and find yourself in the brilliant circle of a
crowded theatre as the curtain falls over a light and airy scene.
With an involuntary start you seize hold on consciousness, and prove
yourself but half awake by running a doubtful parallel between human
life and the hour which has now elapsed. In both you emerge from
mystery, pass through a vicissitude that you can but imperfectly
control, and are borne onward to another mystery. Now comes the peal of
the distant clock with fainter and fainter strokes as you plunge
farther into the wilderness of sleep. It is the knell of a temporary
death. Your spirit has departed, and strays like a free citizen among
the people of a shadowy world, beholding strange sights, yet without
wonder or dismay. So calm, perhaps, will be the final change—so
undisturbed, as if among familiar things, the entrance of the soul to
its eternal home.