A lullaby is potent over us from first to last through our "long infancy." As all nature conspires, from the day of our birth, to kill us, so that it has been no small cause of wonder to philosophers that despite innumerable risks and hazards, thread-hanging swords, burning ploughshares, brinks of precipices, danger on every side, from a breakfast to a battle, we make out to live until we die; so all that may reach the eye and ear without variegation tends to send us to sleep. A monotone of sound or color, the motion of wheels, the fixedness of a column, "sweet musick, floud-gates, arches, falls of water like London bridge, or some continuate noise to benum the senses," can at times cajole the most uneasy into oblivion. There are those, indeed, who need but the knowledge that the sun is at high noon, or that on the spring mid-day grasses it is a pleasant thing to wear the pilfered jewel of the night, to give themselves, docile and drowsy, to the swayings of Mercury's wand.
A school-boy terror wards off a passer-by from the hoariest and comeliest graveyard while stars are marshalled above him; but no such goblin beliefs brush him by sunlight, when the least importunate of men may fain see what an odd, humorsome, gentle-mannered experiment it is to lie between old graves, and to be sealed with the simile and suggestion of that other sleep which hath endured for centuries without fraying. If a survivor may perk himself into security anywhere, it is among these invisible bedfellows. Nowhere else is it such serene gentility to be alive,—such a ticket of authority, such a feather in one's cap. You are of more moment, in the bleared popular eye, than a promiscuous dozen of sages and heroes under, simply inasmuch as
Ah! Mæcenas is ywrapt in clay,
And great Augustus long ago is dead.
Or, in a calmer mood, here shall be found temples on whose lintel you may lie in air, and proffer censer-smoke, and make songs of honor and good-will. Choose some very shrine, and make of it the bed on Parnassus, or good Hilary's cradle, and be not loath to rest abjectly and without distrust amid noble ashes. There are beguilements of sleep urged from the cool, willow-shaded acre of ghosts to the wayfarer hot with life: so Theocritus understood it. "Here lies Hipponax the poet," he said, in one of his sweet epitaphs: "if thou art worthless, draw not nigh his tomb; but if thou art honorable and of fair descent, come! sit here boldly, and, if thou wilt, slumber."
Light sleep is but fairy-like torment, beautiful oppression, when one still can hear the little smith hammering rhythmically in his breast and day-worries pacing to and fro in their cells overhead. Rest that is sound
