DOZING.
"Dozing very much delights."
Our corporeal machinery requires an occasional relaxation, as much as the steam engine does the application of oil to its divers springs; and, after a bonâ fide slumber, we rise with a freshness equal to that of flowers in the best regulated flower-pots. But dozing must not be confounded with legitimate sleep, though frequently tending to the same purpose; it may be termed an embryo slumber, that entertaineth the body with the most quiescent gentleness, acting on our senses as a sort of mental warm bath; till, finally, the "material man" himself luxuriates in tepidity.
Nothing can be more ungodly than to enter the church with an express purpose of dozing there. Arm-chairs, sofas, and beds are the legitimate places for dozers. But there is no accounting for that conquering spirit of all-besetting drowsiness that attacks us at sundry times and places. It is in vain that we lengthen our limbs into an awakening stretch—that we yawn with the expressive suavity of yawning no more—that we dislocate our knuckle bones, and ruffle the symmetry of our visage, with a manual application; like the cleft blaze of a candle, drowsiness returns again. Well, then, what manner of reader is he that hath never sinned by drowsing in church time? Let him read on; and I'll realize by description what he has realized by endurance.
It is after the embodying of a good dinner with ourselves, that doziness is most tempting. You have dined at four o'clock to-day. Well, that's a decent Sabbatical hour. After due potations of wine, coffee, &c. your gratitude is awakened; and, like a good Christian, you arrange your beaver, and walk off steadily to church. Now, remember, I give you full credit for your wish to exhibit your external holiness—that you are indeed conscious of the reverence that should accompany all your engagements in the fane of the Deity; and yet I prognosticate that if the Rev. Nabob Narcotic happen to preach this evening, you will, of a surety, doze—infallibly doze—in the midst of his sermon!
'Tis a summer month, and the very church windows seem labouring with a fit perspiration. Horribly boring—isn't it? How your hat clings to your moistened forehead, and the warm gloves droop from your fingers, like roasting chicken! Get as much room as possible; tenderly pass little miss there, and her unbreeched brother, over to their smiling mamma. Now you have the balmy corner to yourself! "Psalms," first lesson—second ditto—prayers—thanksgivings—all reverently attended to; there is a little dreaminess settling on your lids—your lips begin to close with languor; but you have not dozed. Let's hear the sermon. You are seated with tolerable erectness; and, judging from the steady determination of your eyebrows, one would imagine that your eyes would be open for the whole of the discourse. But, alas! 'tis Mr. Narcotic, whose spectacled nose is just verging above the crimson horizon of his pulpit.—"Awake, thou that sleepest!" Why, the text is quite opposed to DOZINESS! But what of this, if the preacher be addicted to drawling, the weather unobligingly sultry, and you yourself have gradually been dwindling from an uncongenial state of wakefulness into a sleepy calm? 'Tis too much for beldame Nature, believe me!
I perceive that you have rubbed the bridge of your nose several times—that you have tried to swell forth your eyes with a full round stare at the parson; but your stoicism "profiteth nothing." The sermon is irreligiously long; and you are nodding—in a doze! Whether there be much pleasure in a church doze, I am not presuming enough to determine. For myself, I have found nothing more tantalizing than the endeavour to restrain from an occasioned doze during church time. After a certain period, I have perceived the parson diminishing, like a phantasmagoric image—all the ladies' black bonnets sinking away, like a cluster of clouds—and (shame on the confession!) I have performed head worship to the front of my seat, instead of keeping an immovable post-like position, before his reverence. However, a church doze is seldom admired by the wakeful. Should an embryo snore escape from one's nose (and this is possible,) some old grandam, or an upright piece of masculine sanctity, is sure to rouse you; the former will either hem you into awakening shame, or drop her prayer-book on the floor; the latter will most likely thump the same with the imperative tip of his boot. How horridly stupid one seems after being aroused! The woman eyes you with the most piquant, self-justifying sneer possible; while all her little IMMACULATES, if she have any, look at you like so many hissing young turkey cocks; and as for the man—bless his holiness!—he'd frown you down to Hades at once.
"My heart leaps up" when I behold a stage coach—that snug, panel painted, comfortable wheel-whirling "thing of life." O ye days of juvenilian sensibilities—ye eye-feeding, heart-rising scenes of remembered felicity!—how glorious was the coach at the school door! The whip—Ajax Mastigoferos never had such a powerful one as the modern Jehu! The spokes of the wheels—they were handled with admiring fingers! That Jupiter-like throne, the coach-box—who would not have risked his neck to have been seated on it? When all was "right," how eloquent the lip-music of coachee! how fine the introductory frisks of the horses' tails, and the arching plunge of the fore-foot—no rainbow-curve ever was so beauteous! "Oh, happy days! who would not be a boy again?" But away with my puerilities. I intend the reader to take a doze in that comfortable repository for the person—the inside of a coach.
With all the reckless simplicity of boyhood, I maintain that travelling by coach is by no means the least of our sublunary pleasures. Man is a wheelable animal as well as walking one. Winter is the time for a nice inside jaunt. What divine evaporations from the coachman's muzzle! What a joyous creak in the down-flying steps!—and, oh! that comfortable alertness with which we deposit ourselves in the padded corner, and fold our coatflaps over our knees, glance at the frosty steam of the window; and then, quite à la Tityre, repose our recumbent bodies at our ease! Such moments as these are snatches of indefinable bliss. It would appear probable, that a coach was a very inconvenient place for a doze; the attendant bustle, the whip-smacks, bickering wheels, and untranquillizing jolts—
"Like angels' visits, few and far between,"—
are not calculated for sleepiness. Notwithstanding these correlative interruptions, a doze in the coach is by no means uncommon, even in the daytime. Let us examine this a little more intellectually.
Suppose a man is returning to his friends, with a mind composed, and "all his business settled." (By-the-by, how vastly comprehensive this speech is!) Suppose he has entered the coach about four in the afternoon, and, by rare luck, finds he is, for the present, the only inside passenger. Such a man, I say, will be likely to doze before twenty miles have run under the coach-wheels—speaking Hibernicè. For the last half-hour, he will be thinking of himself—how many commissions he has performed—how many he has left undone—and how many he intends to do. The next, he will probably give to his home attractions—his anxious wife, sat musingly round the tea-table—his favourite son George (so like his father)—and all the nine hundred and ninety-nine pretty nothings we hear of, after a brief absence. These will send his heart a long way from the coach, and therefore keep him in the full enjoyment of wakefulness. But this train of delectable musing is by no means exhaustless. The roll of the wheels gradually becomes naturalized to the ear, and the body moves in sympathy with the coach; the road gets very monotonously barren; the lounge in the corner—how suitable then to this solitary languor! Lulled here, the traveller for awhile admires the leathern trappings of the coach, hums a tune perhaps, and affects a dubious whistle. Meantime the operations of doziness have been gently applying themselves. His eye is sated with the road and the coach; his hands become stationary on his lap; his feet supinely rested on the opposite seat; his head instinctively motions to the corner—and he dozes! A doze in the coach is the flower of dozes, when you are alone. There, you may twist your person into any shape you please, without the fear of discomposing a silken dress, or a nursemaid's petticoats. No boisterous arguments from snuff-taking sexagenarians: all is placid —Eden-like—just as a dozer's sanctorum ought to be! The only thing attendant on the doze of an inside passenger, is the great chance of being suddenly aroused by the entrance of company. O tell me, ye of the fine nerve, what is more vexing than to be startled from your nest by the creaking slam of the steps, the bleak winter gales galloping along your face, and a whole bundle of human beings pushing themselves into your retreat! There is no rose without its thorn, as myriads have said before me:—
——"O beate Sexti,
Vitæ summa brevis SPEM nos vetat inchoare LONGAM!"
Not all the morose sarcasms of Johnson, on the pleasures of rural life, have ever weakened my capability for enjoying it at convenient intervals. His antipathy to the country resembled his contempt for blank-verse—he could not enjoy it. I have now moped away a considerable number of months in this city of all things—this—this London. "Well?" Pray restrain yourself, reader; I am coming to the point in due season. During my metropolitan existence—although I am neither a tailor, nor any trade, nor anything exactly—I have never beheld a downright intellectual-looking blade of grass. I mean much by an intellectual blade of grass. The Londoners—poor conceited creatures!—have denominated sundry portions of their Babylon "fields." But—I ask it in all the honest pride of sheer ignorance—is there the ghost even of a bit of grass to be seen in many of them? I cannot easily forget my vexation, when, after a tedious walk to one of those misnomered "fields," I found nothing but a weather-beaten, muggy, smoky assemblage of houses of all sizes, circumscribed by appropriate filth and abundant cabbage-stumps. Innocent of London quackeries, I strolled forth with the full hope of laying me down on a velvet carpet of grass—the birds carolling around me—and, perchance, a flock of lambkins, tunefully baying to their mammas!! "Said I to myself," when I reached these fields, "what a fool I am!" I had contemplated a doze on the grass.
But leaving all thoughts of disappointment, who will not allow that there is something exceedingly delightful in dozing calmly beneath the shade of an o'er-arching tree?
——"recubans sub tegmine fagi."
Of course, the weather should be fine, to admit of this luxurious idleness. Let the blue-bosomed clouds be sailing along, like Peter Bell's boat; let the sunbeams be gilding the face of nature, and tinging the landscape with multiform hues; let the breezes be gentle, the spot retired, and the heart at ease. Now, go and stretch yourself on the grassy couch, while the branches of an aged tree shadow forth the imaged leaves around you. What a congenial situation for philosophy—under an old tree, on a sunny summer day! How much more becoming than the immortal tub of the sour-minded Diogenes? Who will be able to refrain from philosophizing. I repeat it, beneath such an old tree? 'Tis at such times that the heart spontaneously unbends itself—that the fancy tranquillizes its thoughts—and that memory awakens her
——"treasured pictures of a thousand scenes."
Place the palms of your hands beneath your pole, and survey the skies!—calm, beautifully unconscious! By-gone times, and by-gone friends—the thousand commingling scenes of varied life—how they all recur to you now! You fancy you could lie beneath the tree for eternity—so soothing is the employment of doing nothing—or field philosophy! Yet, to speak correctly, you are doing a great deal; your imagination is flying in all directions—from the death of Caesar to the last cup of Congou that you took with a regretted friend. What a mystery your existence is! The world turns round as gently as ever; the flowers bud into life; and the winter nips them. Man lives, thinks, and dies. All very wondrous truisms. Well, after a half-hour—or perchance more—you will be gradually relapsing into a state of soporific nothing-at-all-ness (the best word I can find to express my meaning.) May there be some clear little stream just behind you, laughing along its idle way;—some chirping birds, singing their roundelay—some buzzing flies—you will then be lulled into doziness. However, with or without the purling murmur of the brook—the joyous warbling of the birds—the busy bustling flies—you will not be able to resist the dozing temptations that will steal over you. Your eyes will close gently as flower-leaflets—your thoughts die away in a heavenly confusion—and then you doze!—neither sleeping nor waking, but absolved in delicious dreaminess! O, for such a doze!—Monthly Magazine.