Nocturnality

“ Nature has appointed the night for sleep; the sun arising recals all the animal species, and especially men, to their several offices. They who sleep (saith St. Paul, 1 Thess. 5) sleep in the night, and they who are drunken are drunken in, the night. Therefore, what can be more unseemly than, when all animals rouse with the sun, nay, some even before his appearance, and as it were with a song salute his coming; when the elephant adores the rising sun, man only should lie snoring long after his rising. ”

“ You think you will enjoy the evening twilight an hour or two before going to bed, and lo! the morning begins to dawn. It seems absurd to turn in and sleep by daylight, but you sleep, nevertheless, until eight or nine o'clock, and get up but little refreshed with your repose. You miss the grateful covering of darkness, the sweet, welcome gloom, which shuts your senses, one after one, like the closing petals of a flower, in the restoring trance of the night. The light comes through your eyelids as you sleep, and a certain nervous life of the body that should sleep too keeps awake and active. ”

“ If night then be favourable for a sally, as it is, this is undoubtedly the most suitable hour of night. You assembled here on the signal of the second watch, a time which buries mortals in the profoundest sleep. You will pass through their bodies lulled to sleep, either in silence unnoticed by them, or ready to strike terror into them, should they perceive you, by a sudden shout. ”

“ BIRD RAPTURES. The sunrise wakes the lark to sing, The moonrise wakes the nightingale. Come darkness, moonrise, every thing That is so silent, sweet, and pale: Come, so ye wake the nightingale. Make haste to mount, thou wistful moon, Make haste to wake the nightingale: Let silence set the world in tune [264] To hearken to that wordless tale Which warbles from the nightingale O herald skylark, stay thy flight One moment, for a nightingale Floods us with sorrow and delight. To-morrow thou shalt hoist the sail; Leave us to-night the nightingale. ”

“ But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. ”

“ Just keep your ears open any time after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a dark night. What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises you will hear! The stillness of night is a vulgar error. All the dead things seem to be alive. ”

“ Time flies and morning succeeds the night, but no bill is rendered, and every artifice and trick is employed to detain the guest, until the latter, overcome with saké and fatigue, rolls over on the floor in a drunken sleep. ”

“ Instead of using the night for sleep, you spend it in reading; your bedstead is a bookcase, your pillows a desk! At the time when the wearied brain asks for rest, you lead it through these nocturnal orgies, and you are surprised to find it the worse for them the next day. ”

“ Nor is it necessary to send them to bed at the very time when all nature awakens from the torpid influence of the day-star; sleep in the atmosphere of a stifling bedroom would bring no rest and no pleasant dreams. But an hour after sunset there will be a change; the night-wind rises and the fainting land revives; cool air is a febrifuge and Nature's remedy for the dyspeptic influences of a sultry day. Open every window, and let your children share the luxury of the last evening hour; after breathing the fresh night-air for a while, they will sleep in peace. ”

“ To look forward to luncheon and an afternoon nap, to anticipate dinner and then digest it, makes the day run with pleasant monotony into the night. And night is worth the inspection. The beds in the train are comfortable enough, but the night is vested with misty beauty, and its fascination woos the traveller from his rest. There is the roar of the engine, the rumble of the carriages, the buzz of insects, and the faint rustle of the night wind over the plains. ”

“ Often and often, when allowed to sleep in the Open air at night-time, instead of experiencing all the horrors of a night in the common cell, the cool night-air would send me off into a sound sleep, from which I would start up from some confused dream of old days, and, looking up to the sky, would wonder to myself, half awake and half asleep, which was the dream and which the reality, the old loved scenes, or the prison of es-Saier at Omdurman. ”

“ The daylight is dying
Away in the west,
The wild birds are flying
In silence to rest;
In leafage and frondage
Where shadows are deep,
They pass to its bondage --
The kingdom of sleep.
And watched in their sleeping
By stars in the height,
They rest in your keeping,
O wonderful night. ”

“ The whole of this was probable enough, but no part of it true; for the whole was a dream: the first part of which occurred during the state of Night-Mare, which is a species of somnium; a state neither of sleeping or waking, but essentially different from both; a state in which I possessed a degree of [Pg 45] consciousness which never accompanies sleep; so much, indeed, that I was aware I was in bed, and was labouring under a paroxysm of Night-Mare. This paroxysm continued but a short time, and went off again before I awoke thoroughly. ”

“ In another mood the quiet, subtle sounds of night seem to penetrate devotion with an overpowering tenderness, to waft thought higher even than meditation undisturbed. “It is black night. But you can still hear the crickets, the streamlet, and the nightingale, just one, which sings, sings, sings, in the thick darkness. ”

“ Our sleepless night, and the strong emotions that had kept us awake, made us feel tired and listless, but the bare idea of being exposed to the same torment and fear another time, gave us courage and strength to press on as far as possible in search of some nocturnal refuge, more secure from the four-footed inhabitants of the land, before sunset should have enticed them from their lairs. ”

“ The orange hue of the western horizon remains till ten o'clock, at least, and how much later I am unable to say. The night before last, I could distinguish letters by this lingering gleam between nine and ten o'clock. The dawn, I suppose, shows itself as early as two o'clock, so that the absolute dominion of night has dwindled to almost nothing. There seems to be also a diminished necessity, or, at all events, a much less possibility, of sleep than at other periods of the year. I get scarcely any sound repose just now. It is summer, and not winter, that steals away mortal life. ”

“ Manuscript of "To Night", page 1 Manuscript of "To Night", page 2
Swiftly walk o'er the western wave,
Spirit of Night!
Out of the misty eastern cave,
Where, all the long and lone daylight,
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear--
Swift be thy flight!
Wrap thy form in a mantle gray,
Star-inwrought!
Blind with thine hair the eyes of day ”

“ The brown night has retired, and the meek-eyed moon, mother of dews, has disappeared: the young day pours in apace; the mountains’ misty tops are swelling on the sight, and brightening in the sun. It is the cool, the fragrant, and the silent hour, to meditation due and sacred song; the air is coloured, the efflux divine turns hovels into palaces, and shoots with gold the rags of beggars. ”

“ I shall think often now of those whose watch is by night—not with any pity, for it is a strange, quiet life, but a happy one. I only knew it in a rather dead season, not in the busy time when trains were coming in and patients arriving nightly. There the night staff has small time for reflection. The hours pass in a whirl of bed-baths, dressings, and settlement. ”

“ She goes to bed, but, for the first few hours, she is too much excited to sleep; toward morning, when the air is pure and invigorating, and, when to breathe it, would be to inhale health and life, she falls into a feverish slumber, and wakes not until noonday. ”

“ It was one of those clear, soft, mysterious nights, which one sometimes gets in those latitudes, when the air seems alive with unseen things. One’s half shy of talking for fear of being overheard. I’m no hand at description, but those who have been in those parts know the sort of night I mean. ”

“ PART I.—Poems Mostly Written at Charterhouse—1910-1914
[6]
STAR-TALK
"Are you awake, Gemelli,
This frosty night?"
"We'll be awake till reveillé,
Which is Sunrise," say the Gemelli,
"It's no good trying to go to sleep:
If there's wine to be got we'll drink it deep,
But sleep is gone to to-night,
But sleep is gone for to-night."
"Are you cold too, poor Pleiads,
This frosty night?"
"Yes, and so are the Hyads:
See us cuddle and hug," say the Pleiads,
"All six in a ring: it keeps us warm:
We huddle together like birds in a storm:
It's bitter weather to-night,
It's bitter weather to-night." ”

“ As often as I walk through towns by night, I listen to the bodily night-watch with more pleasure than to the spiritual. In the silent, listening night, under the outspread starry heaven, there is something so sublime in the homiletic owl's-song or hoot of the night-watch, that I have a hundred times wished me a horn and six verses. ”

“ I love it so much that I am loath to confess that sometimes the evening light is even more beautiful. Yet is there a softness that comes with the close of day, a glorification of common things, a drawing of purple shadows over all that is rough or unsightly, which makes the early evening perhaps the most perfect time of all the perfect hours. ”

“ He faces the terror that cometh by night, the destruction that walketh by day, and the pestilence that wasteth at noonday. But night is often kindly—it brings the balm of sleep to our tired bodies and covers coarseness and filth with a softening veil. ”

“ By the time I had made my arrangements and fed Modestine, the day was already beginning to decline. I buckled myself to the knees into my sack and made a hearty meal; and as soon as the sun went down, I pulled my cap over my eyes and fell asleep.
Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. ”

“ It won't do for either of us to watch all night and be sleepy all day. We can split the night up into tricks. It isn't dark until seven and the days are getting longer. We'll make the first watch from dark until midnight, then midnight to four in the morning, and a short trick from four until daylight. We can make up lost sleep in the afternoons. ”

“ And verily, thou choosest the hour well: for just now do the nocturnal birds again fly abroad. The hour hath come for all light-dreading people, the vesper hour and leisure hour, when they do not—“take leisure.”
I hear it and smell it: it hath come—their hour for hunt and procession, not indeed for a wild hunt, but for a tame, lame, snuffling, soft-treaders’, soft-prayers’ hunt,—
—For a hunt after susceptible simpletons: all mouse-traps for the heart have again been set! And whenever I lift a curtain, a night-moth rusheth out of it. ”

“ The evening light, in our country hanging dubiously between the glare of noon and the darkness of midnight, invites to that condition of mind which lies between the intense alertness of day and the deep oblivion of sleep, and which seems the most favourable for the meditation of divine things. ”

“ I shall leave you for an hour or two, and send off Phœbe, and then bring you some breakfast. I’ll lock the door behind me, so that the girl mayn’t come in by chance.’
The daylight changes the aspect of misery to us, as of everything else. In the night it presses on our imagination—the forms it takes are false, fitful, exaggerated; in broad day it sickens our sense with the dreary persistence of definite measurable reality. ”

“ It was my foolish imagination, the effect of the poison.
The night was full of torture. My bed seemed to lift itself under me, then to fall again, then up again! I used autosuggestion: “At night all the Numbers must sleep; sleeping at night is a duty just like working during the day. To sleep at night is necessary for the next day’s work. Not to sleep at night is criminal.” ”

“ The night is more favourable than the day to the traveller's reminiscences: it hides from his eyes the landscapes that would remind him of the regions which he inhabits; it shows him only the luminaries, which look the same under the different latitudes of the same hemisphere. ”

“ The drowsy heat of the afternoon invites to slumber as the cool hours before the noon of night invite to music, reverie, or sentimental conversation, and our midsummer-night dreams would be no worse for a moonlight ramble on the mountains or in the garden-suburbs of a large city. ”

“ It has been suggested that night, covering up the world, gave the first idea of the swallowing myth. Now in some of the stories the night is obviously conceived of as a big beast which swallows all things. The notion that night is an animal is entirely in harmony with savage metaphysics. In the opinion of the savage speculator, all things are men and animals. ‘Ils se persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses sont animées,’ says one of the old Jesuit missionaries in Canada. ”