SLEEP AND DEATH.
St. John xi. 11-14.
To His disciples our Lord spoke of His friend, and theirs, “our friend, Lazarus,” as sleeping; intimating at the same time His intention of going on to Bethany, that He might awaken him out of sleep. “Then said His disciples, Lord, if he sleep he shall do well. Howbeit, Jesus spake of his death; but they thought that He had spoken of taking of rest in sleep. Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.”
The affinity of sleep to death is familiarly recognised in the Old Testament as in the New; indeed, in universal literature of whatever age, sacred and profane. Bathsheba anticipates the day, only too near at hand, when her lord the king “shall sleep with his fathers.” Daniel foretells the awaking of many that sleep in the dust of the earth. The psalmist utters a deprecation lest he sleep the sleep of death. Jesus declared 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 wingèd 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 “Care-charmer 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:
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:
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,—no more; and, by a sleep, to say we end the heart-ache, 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,”
A couplet of Butler’s, in a description of nightfall, tells how
A Greek proverb designates sleep “the minor mysteries of death”—in allusion to the lesser Eleusinian mysteries as compared with the greater: “ὕπος τὰ μικρὰ τοῦ 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:
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 physician—in 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:
“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—
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:—
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:—