When the night’s pass’d away.”
Plants and flowers ought not to be allowed to remain in a chamber at night. Experiments have proved that plants and flowers take up, in the daytime, carbonic acid gas (the refuse of respiration), and give off oxygen (a gas so necessary and beneficial to health), but give out in the night season a poisonous exhalation.
Early rising cannot be too strongly insisted upon; nothing is more conducive to health, and thus to long life. A youth is frequently allowed to spend the early part of the morning in bed, breathing the impure atmosphere of a bed-room, when he should be up and about, inhaling the balmy and health-giving breezes of the morning:
“Rise with the lark, and with the lark to bed:
The breath of night’s destructive to the hue
Of ev’ry flower that blows. Go to the field,
And ask the humble daisy why it sleeps
Soon as the sun departs? Why close the eyes
Of blossoms infinite, long ere the moon
Her oriental veil puts off? Think why,