the sick maiden to be not dead, but sleeping; and was laughed to scorn by those who knew that she was dead. Them that sleep in Jesus, saith the apostle, will God bring with Him. We shall not all sleep, he says elsewhere, but we shall all be changed. Homer personifies a dualism of "Sleep and Death, two twins of winged race, of matchless swiftness, but of silent pace;" and he makes the friends of Sarpedon "his sacred corse bequeath to the soft arms of silent Sleep and Death." He pictures Aphrodite speeding to Lemnos o'er the rolling deep, to "seek the cave of Death's half-brother, Sleep." The dying Gorgias, we are told, being in a slumber, and asked how he did, answered, "Pretty well; only Sleep is commending me to the charge of his brother." Samuel Daniel apostrophizes "Carecharmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, brother to Death, in silent darkness born;" and so too, Beaumont and Fletcher apostrophize him in almost the selfsame words. So again their contemporary, John Webster, "O thou soft natural Death, that art joint twin to sweetest slumber!" Cowley's ode in memoriam of William Harvey, begins with sombre commemoration of a dismal and a fearful night, "when sleep, death's image, left his troubled breast, by something liker death possest." And the last verse of Denham's "Song to Morpheus" identifies the twins, practically makes a hendiadys of them, as grammarians might call it : "Sleep, that is thy best repast, Yet of death it bears a taste, And both are the same thing at last." Warton's Latin epigram on sleep, as certissima mortis imago, has been Englished by Wolcot with a beauty and felicity pronounced by critics to be worthy of the original: "Come, gentle sleep! attend thy votary's prayer; Shelley's opening of "Queen Mab" is a stock quotation : "How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep! one pale as yonder waning moon, with lips of lurid blue; the other rosy as the morn when, throned on ocean's wave, it blushes o'er the world: yet both so passing wonderful!" But where, asks a prose writer of genius, where, in the sharp lineaments of rigid and unsightly death, is the calm beauty of slumber, telling of rest for the waking hours that are past, and gentle hopes and loves for those which are to come? 'Lay death and sleep down, side by side, and say who shall find the two akin." But this is selecting such an aspect of mortality as comes not within the poet's purview. Prosaical in every fibre is Sancho Panza meant to be; yet in his famous invocation of blessings on the invention, or rather on the inventor, of sleep, which, quoth he, "covers a man all over, body and mind, like a cloak "—for Sancho has his poetical moods and tenses after all-he goes on to recognise the affinity which poetry so freely asserts: "It [sleep] has only one fault, as I have heard say, which is, that it looks like death: for between the sleeper and the corpse there is but little to choose." Shakspeare's Iachimo calls sleep the "ape of death." To die, to sleep,-muses Hamlet,-1 ‚—no more; and, by a sleep, to say we end the heartache, and the thousand natural ills that flesh is heir to, were a consummation devoutly to be wished. "Thy best of rest is sleep," soliloquizes the duke in "Measure for Measure," ܂ "And that thou oft provokest; yet grossly fear'st Thy death, which is no more." A couplet of Butler's, in a description of nightfall, tells how "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 : “ ὕπνος τὰ μικρὰ του 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, And quench'd existence crouches in a grave. 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 physicianin 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 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." George Herbert says, that— "When boys go first to bed, They step into their voluntary graves; Sleep binds them fast; only their breath Successive nights, like rolling waves, Convey them quickly, who are bound for death." Ye children, does death ever alarm you? asks the venerable pastor in Tegner's Children of the Lord's Supper: "Death is the brother of Love, twin-brother is he, and is only more austere to behold." Shakspeare's nobleman is gazing with disgust on a sottish sleeper, when he exclaims, "Grim death, how foul and loathsome is thine image!" That image, as embodied in the form of a little child, has often inspired poets to strains of tender admiration. Malaspina, in one of Landor's unacted (not to say, with almost equal truth, unread) plays thus contemplates, and apostrophizes, such an image : "And still thou sleepest, my sweet babe! Is death Sleep, a child's sleep, oh how far more serene, And oh, how far more beautiful than any! Whether we breathe so gently, or breathe not, More familiar to every one in the least conversant with current literature-not ephemeral in its currency, or running so fast as to be, like that which decayeth and waxeth old, ready to vanish away-is Mrs. Browning's poem on a sleeping child— tired out with playing, and slumbering on the floor; the latter portion alone of which may here find room : "And God knows, who sees us twain, child at childish leisure, I am near as tired of pain, as you seem of pleasure ; Very soon, too, by His grace gently wrapt around me, ELIAB AND DAVID IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH. WHE I SAMUEL xvii. 28. HEN the Spirit of God came upon Saul, so that he prophesied among the company of prophets that met him, all that knew him beforetime asked one another what was this that was come to the son of Kish? was Saul also among the prophets? Insomuch that it became a proverb, "Is Saul also among the prophets?" No prophet is accepted in his own country; that is become a proverb too. And as with Saul, a young man among the prophets, so with youthful David among the men of war from their youth. Eliab, his eldest brother, knew, as he thought, the pride and the naughtiness of his heart in coming down to the camp to see the battle; but he knew not what sterling stuff there was in the stripling. Why had Jesse's youngest son come down hither? and with whom had he left those few sheep in the wilderness? Eliab's anger was kindled against David for his presumptuous and idle curiosity. His scorn was well-nigh as supreme as that of Goliath himself for the youth, for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance. Quit his proper rusticities and retirement for the valley of Elah, that bristled with spear-heads and resounded with the din of battle! a boy like him, that should be feeding his father's sheep at Bethlehem! Was there not a cause? None that Eliab knew of, for one. He had never seen anything in the lad to warrant this forwardness. Not to Eliab or 1 |