... “sleep the wearied world relieved,
By counterfeiting death revived.”
A Greek proverb designates sleep “the minor mysteries of death”—in
allusion to the lesser Eleusinian mysteries as compared with the greater:
“ὕπος τὰ μικρὰ τοῦ θανάτου μυστήρια.” Sir Thomas Overbury calls sleep,
death’s picture drawn to the life, or the twilight of life and death.
“In sleep we kindly shake death by the hand; but when we are awaked, we
will not know him.” With the closing clause of this sentence compare the
closing lines in the following picture by Byron, of man o’erlaboured with
his being’s strife, shrinking to “that sweet forgetfulness of life” which
sleep induces:
“There lie love’s feverish hope and cunning’s guile,
Hate’s working brain, and lull’d ambition’s wile;
O’er each vain eye oblivion’s pinions wave,
And quench’d existence crouches in a grave.
What better name may slumber’s bed become?
Night’s sepulchre, the universal home,
Where weakness, strength, vice, virtue, sunk supine,
Alike in naked helplessness recline;
Glad for awhile to heave unconscious breath,
Yet wake to wrestle with the dread of death,
And shun, though day but dawn on ills increast,
That sleep, the loveliest, since it dreams the least.”
We term sleep a death, writes Sir Thomas Browne, and yet it is waking
that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life. “It
is that death by which we may be literally said to die daily; a death
which Adam died before his mortality; a death whereby we live a middle
and moderating point between life and death.” And then the golden-tongued
physician—in his _Religio Medici_—goes on to say that, in fine, so like
death seemed to him sleep, that he dare not trust it without his prayers,
and a half adieu to the world; and taking his farewell “in a colloquy
with God,” that is set in the key of the Evening Hymn, where we pray
to be taught to dread the grave as little as our bed. So, in verses of
his own weaving, this consummate master of stately rhetorical prose,
beseeches God to make his sleep a holy trance:
“Sleep is a death;—O make me try
By sleeping, what it is to die!
And as gently lay my head
On my grave, as now my bed.
Howe’er I rest, great God, let me
Awake again at last with Thee.
And thus assured, behold I lie
Securely, or to wake or die.
These are my drowsy days; in vain
I do now wake to sleep again:
O come that hour when I shall never
Sleep again, but wake for ever!
“This is the dormitive I take to bedward; I need no other laudanum than
this to make me sleep; after which I close my eyes in security, content
to take leave of the sun, and sleep unto the resurrection.”