“Oh, Sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!”
Was the heart’s cry of the Ancient Mariner at the recollection of the
blessed moment when the fearful curse of life in death fell off him and
the heavenly sleep first “slid into his soul.” “Blessings on sleep!”
said honest Sancho Panza: “it wraps one all round like a mantle!”—a
mantle for the weary human frame, lined softly, as with the down of the
eider-duck, and redolent of the soothing odours of the poppy. The fabled
Cave of Sleep was in the Land of Darkness. No ray of the sun, or moon,
or stars, ever broke upon that night without a dawn. The breath of
somniferous flowers floated in on the still air from the grotto’s mouth.
Black curtains hung round the ever-sleeping god; the Dreams stood around
his couch; Silence kept watch at the portals. Take the winged Dreams
from the picture, and what is left? The sleep of matter.
The dreams that come floating through our sleep, and fill the dormitory
with visions of love or terror—what are they? Random freaks of the
fancy? Or is sleep but one long dream, of which we see only fragments,
and remember still less? Who shall explain the mystery of that loosening
of the soul and body, of which night after night whispers to us, but
which day after day is unthought of? Reverie, sleep, trance—such are the
stages between the world of man and the world of spirits. Dreaming but
deepens as we advance. Reverie deepens into the dreams of sleep—sleep
into trance—trance borders on death. As the soul retires from the outer
senses, as it escapes from the trammels of the flesh, it lives with
increased power within. Spirit grows more spirit-like as matter
slumbers. We can follow the development up to the last stage. What is
beyond?
“And in that _sleep of death_, what dreams may come!”
says Hamlet—pausing on the brink of eternity, and vainly striving to
scan the inscrutable. Trance is an awful counterpart of sleep and
death—mysterious in itself, appalling in its hazards. Day after day
noise has been hushed in the dormitory—month after month it has seen a
human frame grow weaker and weaker, wanner, more deathlike, till the
hues of the grave coloured the face of the living. And now he lies,
motionless, pulseless, breathless. It is not sleep—is it death?
Leigh Hunt is said to have perpetrated a very bad pun connected with the
dormitory, and which made Charles Lamb laugh immoderately. Going home
together late one night, the latter repeated the well-known proverb, “A
home’s a home, however homely.” “Aye,” added Hunt, “and a bed’s a bed
however _bedly_.” It is a strange thing, a bed. Somebody has called it a
bundle of paradoxes: we go to it reluctantly, and leave it with regret.
Once within the downy precincts of the four posts, how loth we are to
make our exodus into the wilderness of life. We are as enamoured of our
curtained dwelling as if it were the Land of Goshen or the Cave of
Circe. And how many fervent vows have those dumb posts heard broken!
every fresh perjury rising to join its cloud of hovering fellows, each
morning weighing heavier and heavier, on our sluggard eyelids. A caustic
proverb says;—we are all “good risers at night;” but woe’s me for our
agility in the morning. It is a failing of our species, ever ready to
break out in all of us, and in some only vanquished after a struggle
painful as the sundering of bone and marrow. The Great Frederic of
Prussia found it easier, in after life, to rout the French and
Austrians, than in youth to resist the seductions of sleep. After many
single-handed attempts at reformation, he had at last to call to his
assistance an old domestic, whom he charged, on pain of dismissal, to
pull him out of bed every morning at two o’clock. The plan succeeded, as
it deserved to succeed. All men of action are impressed with the
importance of early rising. “When you begin to turn in bed, its time to
turn out,” says the old Duke; and we believe his practice has been in
accordance with his precept. Literary men—among whom, as Bulwer says, a
certain indolence seems almost constitutional—are not so clear upon this
point: they are divided between Night and Morning, though the best
authorities seem in favour of the latter. Early rising is the best
_elixir vitæ_: it is the only lengthener of life that man has ever
devised. By its aid the great Buffon was able to spend half a century—an
ordinary lifetime—at his desk; and yet had time to be the most modish of
all the philosophers who then graced the gay metropolis of France.
Sleep is a treasure and a pleasure; and, as you love it, guide it
warily. Over-indulgence is ever suicidal, and destroys the pleasure it
means to gratify. The natural times for our lying down and rising up are
plain enough. Nature teaches us, and unsophisticated mankind followed
her. Singing birds and opening flowers hail the sunrise, and the hush of
groves and the closed eyelids of the parterre mark his setting. But “man
hath sought out many inventions.” We prolong our days into the depths of
night, and our nights into the splendour of day. It is a strange result
of civilisation! It is not merely occasioned by that thirst for varied
amusement which characterises an advanced stage of society—it is not
that theatres, balls, dancing, masquerades, require an artificial light,
for all these are or have been equally enjoyed elsewhere beneath the eye
of day. What _is_ the cause, we really are not philosopher enough to
say; but the prevalence of the habit must have given no little pungency
to honest Benjamin Franklin’s joke, when, one summer, he announced to
the Parisians as a great discovery—that the sun rose each morning at
four o’clock; and that, whereas, they burnt no end of candles by sitting
up at night, they might rise in the morning and have light for nothing.
Franklin’s “discovery,” we dare say, produced a laugh at the time, and
things went on as before. Indeed so universal is this artificial
division of day and night, and so interwoven with it are the social
habits, that we shudder at the very idea of returning to the natural
order of things. A Robespierre could not carry through so stupendous a
revolution. Nothing less than an avatar of Siva the Destroyer—Siva with
his hundred arms, turning off as many gaspipes, and replenishing his
necklace of human skulls by decapitating the leading conservatives—could
have any chance of success; and, ten to one, with our gassy splendours,
and seducing glitter, we should convert that pagan devil ere half his
work was done.
But of all the inventions which perverse ingenuity has sought out, the
most incongruous, the most heretical against both nature and art, is
Reading in Bed. Turning rest into labour, learning into ridicule. A man
had better be up. He is spoiling two most excellent things by attempting
to join them. Study and sleep—how incongruous! It is an idle coupling of
opposites, and shocks a sensible man as much as if he were to meet in
the woods the apparition of a winged elephant. Only fancy an elderly or
middle-aged man (for youth is generally orthodox on this point,) sitting
up in bed, spectacles on his nose, a Kilmarnock on his head, and his
flannel jacket round his shivering shoulders,—doing what? Reading? It
may be so—but he winks so often, possibly from the glare of the candle,
and the glasses now and then slip so far down on his nose, and his hand
now and then holds the volume so unsteadily, that if he himself didn’t
assure us to the contrary, we should suppose him half asleep. We are
sure it must be a great relief to him when the neglected book at last
tumbles out of bed, to such a distance that he cannot recover it.
Nevertheless, we have heard this extraordinary custom excused on the no
less extraordinary ground of its being a soporific. For those who
require such things, Marryat gives a much simpler recipe—namely, to
mentally repeat any scraps of poetry you can recollect; if your own, so
much the better. The monks of old, in a similar emergency, used to
repeat the seven Penitential Psalms. Either of these plans, we doubt
not, will be found equally efficacious, if one is able to use them—if
anxiety of mind does not divert him from his task, or the lassitude of
illness disable him for attempting it. Sleep, alas! is at times fickle
and coy; and, like most sublunary friends, forsakes us when most wanted.
Reading in that repertory of many curious things, the “Book of the
Farm,” we one day met with the statement that “a pillow of hops will
ensure sleep to a patient in a delirious fever when every other
expedient fails.” We made a note of it. Heaven forbid that the recipe
should ever be needed for us or ours! but the words struck a chord of
sympathy in our heart with such poor sufferers, and we saddened with the
dread of that awful visitation. The fever of delirium! when incoherent
words wander on the lips of genius; when the sufferer stares strangely
and vacantly on his ministering friends, or starts with freezing horror
from the arms of familiar love! Ah! what a dread tenant has the
dormitory then. No food taken for the body, no sleep for the brain! a
human being surging with diabolic strength against his keepers—a human
frame gifted with superhuman vigour only the more rapidly to destroy
itself! Less fearful to the eye, but more harrowing to the soul, is the
dormitory whose walls enclose the sleepless victim of Remorse. No
poppies or mandragora for him! His malady ends only with the fever of
life. _Ends?_ Grief, anxiety, “the thousand several ills that flesh is
heir to,” pass away before the lapse of time or the soothings of love,
and sleep once more folds its dove-like wings above the couch.
“If there be a regal solitude,” says Charles Lamb, “it is a bed. How the
patient lords it there; what caprices he acts without control! How
king-like he sways his pillow,—tumbling and tossing, and shifting and
lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it to the
ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changes _sides_
oftener than a politician. Now he lies full length, then half-length,
obliquely, transversely, head and feet quite across the bed; and none
accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is absolute.
They are his Mare Clausum. How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a
man’s self to himself! He is his own exclusive object. Supreme
selfishness is inculcated on him as his only duty. ’Tis the two Tables
of the Law to him. He has nothing to think of but how to get well. What
passes out of doors or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them,
affects him not.”
In this climate a sight of the sun is prized; but we love to see it most
from bed. A dormitory fronting the east, therefore, so that the early
sunbeams may rouse us to the dewy beauties of morning, we love. Let
there also be festooned roses without the window, that on opening it the
perfume may pervade the realms of bed. Our night-bower should be
simple—neat as a fairy’s cell, and ever perfumed with the sweet air of
heaven. It is not a place for showy things, or costly. As fire is the
presiding genius in other rooms, so let water, symbol of purity, be in
the ascendant here; water, fresh and unturbid as the thoughts that here
make their home—water, to wash away the dust and sweat of a weary world.
Let no _fracas_ disturb the quiet of the dormitory. We go there for
repose. Our tasks and our cares are left outside, only to be put on
again with our hat and shoes in the morning. It is an asylum from the
bustle of life—it is the inner shrine of our household gods—and should
be respected accordingly. We never entered during the ordinary process
of bed-making—pillows tossed here, blankets and sheets pitched hither
and thither in wildest confusion, chairs and pitchers in the middle of
the floor, feathers and dust everywhere—without a jarring sense that
sacrilege was going on, and that the _genius loci_ had departed. Rude
hands were profaning the home of our slumbers!
A sense of security pervades the dormitory. A healthy man in bed is free
from everything but dreams, and once in a lifetime, or after adjudging
the Cheese Premium at an Agricultural Show—the nightmare. We once heard
a worthy gentleman, blessed with a very large family of daughters,
declare he had no peace in his house except in bed. There we feel as if
in a City of Refuge, secure alike from the brawls of earth and the
storms of heaven. Lightning, say old ladies, won’t come through
blankets. Even tigers, says Humboldt, “will not attack a man in his
hammock.” Hitting a man when he’s down is stigmatised as villainous all
the world over; and lions will rather sit with an empty stomach for
hours than touch a man before he awakes. Tricks upon a sleeper! Oh,
villainous! Every perpetrator of such unutterable treachery should be
put beyond the pale of society. The First of April should have no place
in the calendar of the dormitory. We would have the maxim “Let sleeping
dogs lie,” extended to the human race. And an angry dog, certainly, is a
man roused needlessly from his slumbers. What an outcry we Northmen
raised against the introduction of Greenwich time, which defrauded us of
fifteen minutes’ sleep in the morning; and how indiscriminate the
objurgations lavished upon printers’ devils! Of all sinners against the
nocturnal comfort of literary men, these imps are the foremost; and
possibly it was from their malpractices in such matters that they first
acquired their diabolic cognomen.
The nightcap is not an elegant head-dress, but its comfort is
undeniable. It is a diadem of night; and what tranquillity follows our
self-coronation! It is priceless as the invisible cap of Fortunatus;
and, viewless beneath its folds, our cares cannot find us out. It is
graceless. Well; what then? It is not meant for the garish eye of day,
nor for the quizzing-glass of our fellow-men, or of the ridiculing race
of women; neither does it outrage any taste for the beautiful in the
happy sleeper himself. We speak as bachelors, to whom the pleasures of a
manifold existence are unknown. Possibly the æsthetics of night are not
uncared for when a man has another self to please, and when a pair of
lovely eyes are fixed admiringly on his upper story; but such is the
selfishness of human nature, that we suspect this abnegation of comfort
will not long survive the honeymoon. The French, ever enamoured of
effect, and who, we verily believe, even _sleep_ “_posé_,” sometimes
substitute the many-coloured silken handkerchief for the graceless
“_bonnet-de-nuit_.” But all such substitutes are less comfortable and
more troublesome; and of all irritating things, the most irritating is a
complex operation in undressing. Æsthetics at night, and for the weary!
No, no. The weary man frets at every extra button or superfluous knot,
he counts impatiently every second that keeps him from his couch, and
flies to the arms of sleep as to those of his mistress. Nevertheless,
French novelette writers make a great outcry against nightcaps. We
remember an instance. A husband—rather a good-looking fellow—suspects
that his wife is beginning to have too tender thoughts towards a
glossy-ringletted Lothario who is then staying with them. So, having
accidentally discovered that Lothario slept in a huge peeked nightcowl,
and knowing that ridicule would prove the most effectual disenchanter,
he fastened a string to his guest’s bell, and passed it into his own
room.
At the dead of night, when all were fast asleep, suddenly Lothario’s
bell rang furiously. Upstarted the lady—“their guest must be ill;”—and
accompanied by her husband, elegantly coiffed in a turbaned silk
handkerchief, she entered the room whence the alarum had sounded. They
find Lothario sitting up in bed—his cowl rising pyramid-fashion, a
fool’s cap all but the bells—bewildered and in ludicrous consternation
at being surprised thus by the fair Angelica; and, unable to conceal his
chagrin, he completes his discomfiture by bursting out in wrathful abuse
of his laughing host for so betraying his weakness for nightcaps.
The Poetry of the Dormitory! It is an inviting but too delicate a
subject for our rough hands. Do not the very words call up a vision? By
the light of the stars we see a lovely head resting on a downy pillow;
the bloom of the rose is on that young cheek, and the half-parted lips
murmur as in a dream: “Edward!” Love is lying like light at her heart,
and its fairy wand is showing her visions. May her dreams be happy!
“Edward!” Was it a sigh that followed that gentle invocation? What would
the youth give to hear that murmur,—to gaze like yonder stars on his
slumbering love. Hush! are the morning-stars singing together—a lullaby
to soothe the dreamer? A low dulcet strain floats in through the window;
and soon, mingling with the breathings of the lute, the voice of youth.
The harmony penetrates through the slumbering senses to the dreamer’s
heart; and ere the golden curls are lifted from the pillow, she is
conscious of all. The serenade begins anew. What does she hear?
“Stars of the summer night!
Far in yon azure deeps,
Hide, hide your golden light!
She sleeps!
My lady sleeps!
Sleeps!
Dreams of the summer night!
Tell her her lover keeps
Watch! while in slumbers light
She sleeps!
My lady sleeps!
Sleeps!”[3]
Footnote 3:
The first and last stanzas of a Serenade of Longfellow’s.
Published at the Office, No 16, Wellington Street North, Strand.
Printed by BRADBURY & EVANS, Whitefriars, London.
------------------------------------------------------------------------