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:
“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;
And, though death’s image to my couch repair,
How sweet, though lifeless, yet with life to lie,