Have I enjoyed the golden dew of sleep."
"For some must watch and some must sleep,
So runs the world away."
"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon that bank."
"The best of rest is sleep."
"Our little lives are rounded with a sleep."
The various passages cited above prove and illustrate that no author has written so feelingly, so appreciatingly, as Shakespeare on the subject of sleep and its loss.
The diligent commentators on his works have investigated laboriously the sources from which he drew his plots and many of the very lines of his poems. He was a great borrower; absorbing, digesting, and making his own much of the material of his predecessors. But it is a noteworthy fact, that none of the exquisite lines in praise of sleep—that gift which the Psalmist says the Lord giveth to his beloved— can be traced to other source than the master. These are jewels of his own; transcripts from his own mournful experience. In middle life he remembered hopelessly the tranquil sleep of his lost youth, as
"He that is stricken blind cannot forget
The precious treasure of his eyesight lost."