Nor silence under dreamful canopies,
Nor purple cushions of the lofty couch,
May lull this fever for a little while.”
Impressive in history, not romance, as Plutarch tells it, is the story of Pausanius as a haunted man, from the hour that Cleonice fell dead at his feet, pierced by his sword. “From that hour he could rest no more.” Her spectre perturbed him every night. Henceforth, nor poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, could ever medicine him to that sweet sleep which he owed yesterday. As a guilty spirit says of guilt, in one of Landor’s fragments,—
“It wakes me many mornings, many nights,
And fields of poppies could not quiet it.”
Modern fiction abounds with examples to the purpose. There is Colonel Whyte Melville’s remorseful woman of the world bidding her young friend good night, and meaning it all the more because her own good nights are dead and gone: “What would I give to yawn as honestly as you do, and to sleep sound once again, as I used to sleep when I was a girl!” There is Mr. Trollope’s Lady Mason, so wistfully, so vainly longing for rest—to be able to lay aside the terrible fatigue of being ever on the watch. From the burden of that necessity she has never been free since her crime was first committed. “She had never known true rest. She had not once trusted herself to sleep without the feeling that her first waking thought would be one of horror, as the remembrance of her position came upon her.” As with the royal lady pictured by the laureate,—
“Many a time for hours
In the dead night, grim faces came and went
Before her, or a vague spiritual fear—