Fancy her terrors built upon the true;
And night and day had their alternate woes,
That baffled pleasure, and that mocked repose.”
The hero of one popular prose fiction describes himself as lying awake night after night, quivering with his great sorrow—wishing that the first dull grey of morning would appear at the window; and when it came, longing for night and darkness once more. Of the heroine in another we read that “the terrible ‘demon of the bed,’ that invests our lightest sorrows with such hopeless and crushing anxiety, reigned triumphant over its gentle victim; and yet, when the daylight crept through her uncurtained windows, she shrunk from it, as though in her broken spirit she preferred to hide her distress in the gloom of night, fearful and unrelieved as was its dark dominion.” How sickening, how dark, exclaims Keats, in the fantastic diction of “Endymion,” “the dreadful leisure of weary days, made deeper exquisite by a foreknowledge of unslumbrous night!” Mr. Tennyson pictures to us the simple maid Elaine, who went half the night repeating, Must she die?
“And now to right she turned, and now to left,
And found no ease in turning or in rest”—
like one of those depicted by Keble—
“... who darkling and alone,
Would wish the weary night were gone,