consideration of the charms of sleep, who untangles our problems and does so much of our melancholizing for us, and carves unbid on a sonnet, so that it is popped, cunningly wrought, under our astonished thumb next morning; to think over all these agreeable things, wish that they may not be denied to our neighbor, and take time to work ourself into a fitting and ripe gratitude for such ample favor; to syllable piously lines which Sidney writ and our childhood learned:
Sleep, O sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe!
and to breathe, for that also is down in the ritual, a rueful sigh of greeting to the patronal band, Marcian, Malchus, Maximin, Dionysius, John, Serapion, Constantine, who lay in the Cœlian cave one hundred and ninety-six years of sleep, to leave us now but the pittance of one gingerly night, and drank so ungenerously of the divine draught that we must needs wake at every matin-chime of sheer expectancy and with lips athirst, like a cheated guest who watches the brimming loving-cup down the great table and finds it at last hollow as last year's nest.
One is sensitively himself on the border-land of repose. The pick of a lifetime is in these moments of semi-resurrection, when as yet we are under no conviction that to get up is dignified or humane, and when thoughts many and potent, bathed in the near rainbow-hue of dreams, as no afternoon-fancies can be, entertain the languid intelligence. Superb alchemy! Then unsuspecting capabilities burgeon; heroics are child's play. We have moved the world in sublime generalship, detail by detail, riddled the stars, caught the leviathan, winnowed a lordly library out of the wastes of printerdom, shut all Pandora's evils fast in their box again,—in bed. It happened once, in winter, that we rose to the surface of activity with the victorious, brotherly memory of Nelson upbearing us, how, whence, or why no man may guess, and so on to that day's warfare, in perfect integrity of heart.
Often is it our fortune that some compelling, stinging splendor lays hold all too early of our befogged body and shakes it in a flash out of profoundest apathy; something so fine that it seems, were it not for that, we should sleep unchallenged for an arctic season; something that posts us on our feet excitedly, as if the whole weal of this world depended on our special nerve and invention. No delicious speculation and philosophizing after that. The royalty which is ourself may turn on its side and doze if the usual hodden valet knock at the portal and go, believing us acquiescent; but when a king from far away blusters, booted and spurred, into the chamber, and slaps his gauntlet
