At what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his night gear,
and prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are not
naturalists enough to determine. But for a mere human gentleman--that
has no orchestra business to call him from his warm bed to such
preposterous exercise--we take ten, or half after ten (eleven, of
course, during this Christmas solstice), to be the very earliest hour
at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To think of
it, we say; for to do it in earnest requires another half hour's good
consideration. Not but there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told,
and such like gauds abroad in the world in summer-time especially,
some hours before what we have assigned, which a gentleman may see, as
they say, only for getting up. But having been tempted once or twice,
in earlier life, to assist at those ceremonies, we confess our
curiosity abated. We are no longer ambitious of being the sun's
courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours of
the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances; which have in
them, besides, something pagan and Persic. To say truth, we never
anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as 'tis called),
to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we
suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and
headaches; Nature herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our
presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the
measures of that celestial and sleepless traveler. We deny not that
there is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially,
in these break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of
a lazy world, to conquer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of
sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually, in strange qualms
before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion.
Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their
clothes, or are already up and about their occupations, content to
have swallowed their sleep by wholesale, we choose to linger abed, and
digest our dreams. It is the very time to recombine the wandering
images which night in a confused mass presented; to snatch them from
forgetfulness; to shape and mold them. Some people have no good of
their dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly to taste
them curiously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to
collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again,
with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to drag into
daylight a struggling and half-vanishing nightmare; to handle and
examine the terrors or the airy solaces. We have too much respect for
these spiritual communications to let them go so lightly. We are not
so stupid or so careless as that imperial forgetter of his dreams,
that we should need a seer to remind us of the form of them. They seem
to us to have as much significance as our waking concerns; or rather
to import us more nearly, as more nearly we approach by years to the
shadowy world whither we are hastening. We have shaken hands with the
world's business; we have done with it; we have discharged ourselves
of it.
Why should we get up? We have neither suit to solicit, nor affairs to
manage. The drama has shut in upon us at the fourth act. We have
nothing here to expect but in a short time a sick-bed and a dismissal.
We delight to anticipate death by such shadows as night affords. We
are already half acquainted with ghosts. We were never much in the
world. Disappointment early struck a dark veil between us and its
dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed gray before our hairs. The
mighty changes of the world already appear as but the vain stuff out
of which dramas are composed. We have asked no more of life than what
the mimic images in playhouses present us with. Even those types have
waxed fainter. Our clock appears to have struck. We are superannuated.
In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, we contract politic alliances
with shadows. It is good to have friends at court. The abstracted
media of dreams seem no ill introduction to that spiritual presence,
upon which, in no long time, we expect to be thrown. We are trying to
know a little of the usages of that colony; to learn the language, and
the faces we shall meet with there, that we may be the less awkward at
our first coming among them. We willingly call a fantom our fellow, as
knowing we shall soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore we
cherish dreams. We try to spell in them the alphabet of the invisible
world, and think we know already how it shall be with us. Those
uncouth shapes, which, while we clung to flesh and blood, affrighted
us, have become familiar. We feel attached into their meager essences,
and have given the hand of half-way approach to incorporeal being. We
once thought life to be something, but it has unaccountably fallen
from us before its time. Therefore we choose to dally with visions.
The sun has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why should we get up?