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FROM "ASTROPHEL AND STELLA."

COME, Sleep, O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
The indifferent judge between the high and low,
With shield of proof shield me from out the prease*
Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw;
O, make me in those civil wars to cease:
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light,
A rosy garland, and a weary head:
And if these things, as being thine in right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me
Livelier than elsewhere Stella's image see.

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FROM "SECOND PART OF HENRY IV.," ACT III. SC. 1.

KING HENRY. How many thousand of my poorest subjects

Are at this hour asleep! O sleep! O gentle

sleep!

Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down,

And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

Why rather, sleep. liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,

And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy

slumber,

Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,

And lulled with sounds of sweetest melody?

O thou dull god! why liest thou with the vile, In loathsome beds, and leav'st the kingly couch A watch-case, or a common 'larum-bell?

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge,
And in the visitation of the winds,
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them
With deafening clamors in the slippery clouds,
That, with the hurly, death itself awakes?
Canst thou, O partial sleep! give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down;
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

SLEEPLESSNESS.

SHAKESPEARE.

A FLOCK of sheep that leisurely pass by
One after one; the sound of rain, and bees
Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,
Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure

sky;

I've thought of all by turns, and still I lie
Sleepless; and soon the small birds' melodies
Must hear, first uttered from my orchard trees,
And the first cuckoo's melancholy cry.

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O night!

There can come no sorrow;

Even thus last night, and two nights more, I lay, And to celestial joy their kindred souls invite.
And could not win thee, Sleep, by any stealth:
So do not let me wear to-night away:
Without thee what is all the morning's wealth?
Come, blessed barrier between day and day,
Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

HYMN TO NIGHT.

YES! bear them to their rest;

The rosy babe, tired with the glare of day,
The prattler, fallen asleep e'en in his play;
Clasp them to thy soft breast,

O night!

Bless them in dreams with a deep, hushed delight.

Yet must they wake again,

Wake soon to all the bitterness of life,

The pang of sorrow, the temptation strife,
Aye to the conscience pain:

O night!

Canst thou not take with them a longer flight?

Canst thou not bear them far

E'en now, all innocent, before they know
The taint of sin, its consequence of woe,
The world's distracting jar,

O night!

To some ethereal, holier, happier height?

The brow shall know no shade, the eye no tears,
Forever young, through heaven's eternal years
In one unfading morrow,

O night!
Nor sin nor age nor pain their cherub beauty
blight.

Would we could sleep as they,

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So stainless and so calm, at rest with Thee,
And only wake in immortality!
Bear us with them away,

O night!

To that ethereal, holier, happier height.

GEORGE WASHINGTON BETHUNE.

WATCHING.

SLEEP, love, sleep!

The dusty day is done.

Lo! from afar the freshening breezes sweep
Wide over groves of balm,

Down from the towering palm,

In at the open casement cooling run,
And round thy lowly bed,
Thy bed of pain,

Bathing thy patient head,
Like grateful showers of rain

They come ;

While the white curtains, waving to and fro,
Fan the sick air ;

And pityingly the shadows come and go,
With gentle human care,
Compassionate and dumb.

The dusty day is done,
The night begun ;

While prayerful watch I keep,
Sleep, love, sleep!

Is there no magic in the touch

of fingers thou dost love so much?

Fain would they scatter poppies o'er thee now;
Or, with its mute caress,

The tremulous lip some soft nepenthe press
Upon thy weary lid and aching brow;
While prayerful watch I keep,
Sleep, love, sleep!

On the pagoda spire

The bells are swinging,

Their little golden circlet in a flutter

The candles flare

With fresher gusts of air;

The beetle's drone

Turns to a dirge-like, solitary moan;

Night deepens, and I sit, in cheerless doubt alone

EMILY CHUBBUCK JUDSON.

THE DREAM.

OUR life is twofold; sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,

And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy ;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become

A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;

They pars like spirits of the past, — they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power,

With tales the wooing winds have dared to utter, The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
Till all are ringing,

As if a choir

Of golden-nested birds in heaven were singing,
And with a lulling sound

The music floats around,

And drops like balm into the drowsy ear ;
Commingling with the hum
Of the Sepoy's distant drum,
And lazy beetle ever droning near.
Sounds these of deepest silence born,
Like night made visible by morn;
So silent that I sometimes start
To hear the throbbings of my heart,
And watch, with shivering sense of pain,
To see thy pale lids lift again.

The lizard, with his mouse-like eyes,
Peeps from the mortise in surprise

At such strange quiet after day's harsh din;
Then boldly ventures out,

And looks about,

And with his hollow feet

Treads his small evening beat,

Darting upon his prey

In such a tricky, winsome sort of way,
His delicate marauding seems no sin.
And still the curtains swing,

But noiselessly;

The bells a melancholy murmur ring,

As tears were in the sky:
More heavily the shadows fall,

Like the black foldings of a pall,

Where juts the rough beam from the wall;

They make us what we were not, what they

will,

And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanished shadows. Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? What are they?
Creations of the mind? - The mind can make
Substances, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recall a vision which I dreamed
Perchance in sleep,- for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.

I saw two beings in the hues of youth
Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill,
Green and of a mild declivity, the last
As 't were the cape of a long ridge of such,
Save that there was no sea to lave its base,
But a most living landscape, and the wave
Of woods and cornfields, and the abodes of men
Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke
Arising from such rustic roofs; the hill
Was crowned with a peculiar diadem
Of trees, in circular array, so fixed,
Not by the sport of nature, but of inan :
These two, a maiden and a youth, were there
Gazing, - the one on all that was beneath
Fair as herself, - but the boy gazed on her;
And both were young, and one was beautiful;
And both were young, - yet not alike in youth.
As the sweet moon on the horizon's verge,
The maid was on the eve of womanhood;

The boy had fewer summers, but his heart
Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye
There was but one beloved face on earth,
And that was shining on him; he had looked
Upon it till it could not pass away;
He had no breath, no being, but in hers;
She was his voice; he did not speak to her,
But trembled on her words; she was his sight,
For his eye followed hers, and saw with hers,
Which colored all his objects; ;- he had ceased
To live within himself: she was his life,
The ocean to the river of his thoughts,
Which terminated all; upon a tone,

his heart

A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow,
And his cheek change tempestuously,
Unknowing of its cause of agony.

But she in these fond feelings had no share :
Her sighs were not for him; to her he was
Even as a brother, but no more; 't was much,
For brotherless she was, save in the name
Her infant friendship had bestowed on him;
Herself the solitary scion left

Of a time-honored race. It was a name
Which pleased him, and yet pleased him not,
and why?

Was traced, and then it faded, as it came;
He dropped the hand he held, and with slow
steps

Retired, but not as bidding her adieu,

For they did part with mutual smiles; he passed
From out the massy gate of that old Hall,
And mounting on his steed he went his way;
And ne'er repassed that hoary threshold more.

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The boy was sprung to manhood; in the wilds
Of fiery climes he made himself a home,
And his soul drank their sunbeams; he was girt
With strange and dusky aspects; he was not
Himself like what he had been on the sea
And on the shore he was a wanderer;
There was a mass of many images
Crowded like waves upon me, but he was
A part of all; and in the last he lay
Reposing from the noontide sultriness,
Couched among fallen columns, in the shade
Of ruined walls that had survived the names
Of those who reared them; by his sleeping side
Stood camels grazing, and some goodly steeds
Were fastened near a fountain; and a man,

Time taught him a deep answer when she Clad in a flowing garb, did watch the while,

loved

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While many of his tribe slumbered around :
And they were canopied by the blue sky,
So cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful,
That God alone was to be seen in heaven.

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The lady of his love was wed with one
Who did not love her better in her home,
A thousand leagues from his, - her native home,
She dwelt, begirt with growing infancy,
Daughters and sons of beauty, -- but behold!
Upon her face there was the tint of grief,
The settled shadow of an inward strife,
And an unquiet drooping of the eye,
As if its lid were charged with unshed tears.
What could her grief be? she had all she loved,
And he who had so loved her was not there
To trouble with bad hopes, or evil wish,
Or ill-repressed affliction, her pure thoughts.
What could her grief be? - she had loved him
not,

Nor given him cause to deem himself beloved,
Nor could he be a part of that which preyed
Upon her mind a spectre of the past.

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.'
The wanderer was returned. I saw him stand
Before an altar with a gentle bride ;
Her face was fair, but was not that which made
The starlight of his boyhood; as he stood
Even at the altar, o'er his brow there came

The selfsame aspect and the quivering shock
That in the antique oratory shook

His bosom in its solitude; and then

As in that hour - a moment o'er his face
The tablet of unutterable thoughts

Was traced, and then it faded as it came,
And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke
The fitting vows, but heard not his own words,
And all things reeled around him; he could see
Not that which was, nor that which should have
been,
But the old mansion, and the accustomed hall,
And the remembered chambers, and the place,
The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade,
All things pertaining to that place and hour,
And her who was his destiny, came back

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That on its own creations spends itself.
All things he understands, and nothing does.

And thrust themselves between him and the Profusely eloquent in copious praise

light;

What business had they there at such a time?

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The lady of his love; O, she was changed,
As by the sickness of the soul! her mind
Had wandered from its dwelling, and her eyes,
They had not their own lustre, but the look
Which is not of the earth; she was become
The queen of a fantastic realm; her thoughts
Were combinations of disjointed things,
And forms impalpable and unperceived
Of others' sight familiar were to hers.

And this the world calls frenzy; but the wise
Have a far deeper madness, and the glance
Of melancholy is a fearful gift;
What is it but the telescope of truth,
Which strips the distance of its fantasies,
And brings life near in utter nakedness,
Making the cold reality too real!

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The wanderer was alone as heretofore,
The beings which surrounded him were gone,
Or were at war with him; he was a mark
For blight and desolation, compassed round
With hatred and contention; pain was mixed
In all which was served up to him, until,
Like to the Pontic monarch of old days,
He fed on poisons, and they had no power,
But were a kind of nutriment; he lived
Through that which had been death to many men,
And made him friends of mountains: with the
stars

And the quick Spirit of the universe
He held his dialogues; and they did teach
To him the magic of their mysteries;

To him the book of Night was opened wide,
And voices from the deep abyss revealed
A marvel and a secret. Be it so.

Of action, he will talk to you as one
Whose wisdom lay in dealings and transactions;
Yet so much action as might tie his shoe
Cannot his will command; himself alone
By his own wisdom not a jot the gainer.
Of silence, and the hundred thousand things
'Tis better not to mention, he will speak,
And still most wisely.

HENRY TAYLOR.

UNKNOWN POETS.

FROM THE EXCURSION," BOOK 1.

O, MANY are the poets that are sown
By nature; men endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine;

Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse
(Which, in the docile season of their youth,
It was denied them to acquire, through lack
Of culture and the inspiring aid of books,
Or haply by a temper too severe,
Or a nice backwardness afraid of shame),
Nor having e'er, as life advanced, been led
By circumstance to take unto the height
The measure of themselves, these favored beings,
All but a scattered few, live out their time,
Husbanding that which they possess within,
And go to the grave, unthought of.

minds

Strongest

Are often those of whom the noisy world Hears least.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

THE POET OF NATURE.

FROM "FESTUS."

He had no times of study, and no place;
All places and all times to him were one.
His soul was like the wind-harp, which he loved,
And sounded only when the spirit blew,

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