Читать книгу The Seven Sisters of Sleep - M. C. Cooke - Страница 5

Table of Contents

In all times Sleep has been a fertile theme with poets—one on which the best and worst has been written. All forms in heaven and in earth have submitted themselves to become similes; and columns of adjectives have done duty in the service since Edmund Spenser raised his House of Sleep, where

“careless Quiet lyes,

Wrapt in eternal silence, farre from enimyes.”

No monarch has numbered so many odes in his praise, or had so many poet laureates “all for love.” These, though not so long, are quite as worthy as the one we heard when George III. was no longer king. Perhaps that same little tyrant, Love, has come in for even a larger share of what some would call “twaddle.” In the sunny morn of youth, these hung upon our lips, and dwelt in our hearts, with less of doubt than disturbs their present repose. Old age makes us sleepy, and we sing—

“O magic sleep! O comfortable bird,

That broodest o’er the troubled sea of the mind

Till it is hushed and smooth! O unconfined

Restraint, imprisoned liberty, great key

To golden palaces, strange minstrelsy,

Fountains grotesque, new trees, bespangled caves,

Echoing grottoes, full of tumbling waves

And moonlight; aye, to all the mazy world

Of silvery enchantments!”——Endymion.

“God gave sleep to the bad,” said Sadi, “in order that the good might be undisturbed.” Yet to good and bad sleep is alike necessary. During the hours of wakefulness the active brain exerts its powers without cessation or rest, and during sleep the expenditure of power is balanced again by repose. The physical energies are exhausted by labour, as by wakefulness are those of the mind; and if sleep comes not to reinvigorate the mental powers, the overtaxed brain gives way, and lapses into melancholy and madness. Men deprived of rest, as a sentence of death, have gone from the world raving maniacs; and violent emotions of the mind, without repose, have so acted upon the body, that, as in the case of Marie Antoinette, Ludovico Sforza, and others, their hair has grown white in a single night—

“As men’s have grown from sudden fears.”2

Mind and body alike suffer from the want of sleep, the spirit is broken, and the fire of the ardent imagination quenched. Who can wonder that when disease or pain has racked and tortured the frame, and prevented a subsidence into a state so natural and necessary to man, he should have resorted to the aid of drugs and potions, whereby to lull his pains, and dispel the care which has banished repose, and woo back again—

“the certain knot of peace,

The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe;

The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,

Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low.”

Leigh Hunt has well said, “It is a delicious moment that of being well nestled in bed, and feeling that you shall drop gently to sleep. The good is to come, not past; the limbs have just been tired enough to render this remaining in one posture delightful; the labour of the day is gone—a gentle failure of the perceptions creeps over you—the spirit of consciousness disengages itself once more, and with slow and hushing degrees, like a mother detaching her hand from that of a sleeping child, the mind seems to have a balmy lid closing over it, like the eye—it is closed—the mysterious spirit has gone to take its airy rounds.”

It is this universal sense of the blessing of sleep which takes hold of the mind with such a religious feeling, that the appearance of a sleeping form, whether of childhood or age, checks our step, and causes us to breathe softly lest we disturb their repose. We can scarce forbear whispering, while standing before the well-known picture of the “Last Sleep of Argyle,” lest by louder or more distinct articulation, we should rob the poor old man of a moment of that absence of sorrow which sleep has brought to him for the last time.

Shakespeare has made the murder of Duncan to seem the more revolting in that it was committed while he slept. Macbeth himself must have felt this while exclaiming—

“Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!

Macbeth does murther sleep, the innocent sleep;

Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,

The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast.’”

Had Desdemona been sent to her last account at once, when her lord entered the room and kissed her as she slept, we feel that all our pity for the jealous Moor would have been turned to hate, and our detestation of him been so great that no room had been left for execration of the villanous Iago, who now seems to be the Mephistopheles, the evil genius, of the work.

“A blessing,” says Sancho Panza, “on him who first invented sleep; it wraps a man all round like a cloak.” But neither Sancho nor any one else will give us a blessing if we suffer ourselves to go to sleep in thinking over it, at the very threshold of our enterprise, and before indulging in communion with the seven sisters of whom we have spoken. It was a trite remark of a divine that “where drowsiness begins, devotion ends,” and needs application as much to book writers as to sermon preachers. Although we may not have the power to check an occasional yawn, in which there may be as much temporal relief as in a good sneeze, let us avoid the premonitory sinking of the upper eyelids, by calling in the aid of Francesco Berni to release us from the spell of sleep, and introduce us to “the sisters” of the olden time.

“Quella diceva ch’era la piu bella

Arte, il piu bel mestier che si facesse;

Il letto er’ una veste, una gonella

Ad ognun buona che se la mettesse.”

Orland. Innamor, lib. iii. cant. vii.