First found me, and with soft oppression seiz’d
My drownéd sense, untroubled; tho’ I thought
I then was passing to my former state,
Insensible, and forthwith to dissolve.”
But how fearful is this resemblance which changes “tir’d nature’s sweet restorer” into a type of death! Pr’ythee, Evelyn, do not affright me thus, by clothing sleep with terror, as if it were disease and danger.
Ev. Why tremble for the mortal sleep of the just and good, who will feel, with William Hunter, on their death-bed, “how pleasant and easy it is to die;” and with another moralist, —
“Oh what a wonder seems the fear of death,
Seeing how gladly we all sink to sleep;
Night following night!”
Fear not, Castaly; I do not term slumber and gentle sleep disease, but signs of health. Not so, however, many a profound sleep, and its advances towards coma; those results of exhaustion from excess, or from intense and direct narcotics, as opium sleep, and the paralyzing senselessness from extreme cold, as in the story of Sir Joseph Banks and Dr. Solander in the antarctic regions.