With dreams that to the wakeful mind belong.”
“Something like a stupid sleep oppresses me,” writes one of Henry Mackenzie’s characters; “last night I could not sleep. Where are now those luxurious slumbers, those wandering dreams of future happiness? Never shall I know them again.” Falkland avows to Caleb Williams, the involuntary master of his master’s fatal secret, that “from the hour the crime was committed” he has not had an hour’s peace: “I became changed from the happiest into the most miserable being that lives; sleep has fled from my eyes.” And Caleb Williams himself testifies in an after chapter, “The ease and light-heartedness of my youth were for ever gone. The voice of an irresistible necessity had commanded me to ‘sleep no more.’” They that do murder, says Roscoe’s Violenzia,—
“Never sleep more, never more taste of peace,
Quaff poison in their drink, see knives in the dark,
And ever at their elbow horror walks,
Shaking them like a palsy.”
The bitter contrast—ah, for the change ’twixt now and then!—is forcibly worded by Bosola in the “Duchess of Malfi”:—
“O sacred innocence, that sweetly sleeps
On turtle’s feathers! whilst a guilty conscience
Is a perspective that foreshows us hell.”