Читать книгу The Seven Sisters of Sleep. Popular History of the Seven Prevailing Narcotics of the World онлайн

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“O magic sleep! O comfortable bird,

That broodest o’er the troubled sea of the mind

Till it is hushed and smooth! O unconfined

Restraint, imprisoned liberty, great key

To golden palaces, strange minstrelsy,

Fountains grotesque, new trees, bespangled caves,

Echoing grottoes, full of tumbling waves

And moonlight; aye, to all the mazy world

Of silvery enchantments!”——Endymion.

“God gave sleep to the bad,” said Sadi, “in order that the good might be undisturbed.” Yet to good and bad sleep is alike necessary. During the hours of wakefulness the active brain exerts its powers without cessation or rest, and during sleep the expenditure of power is balanced again by repose. The physical energies are exhausted by labour, as by wakefulness are those of the mind; and if sleep comes not to reinvigorate the mental powers, the overtaxed brain gives way, and lapses into melancholy and madness. Men deprived of rest, as a sentence of death, have gone from the world raving maniacs; and violent emotions of the mind, without repose, have so acted upon the body, that, as in the case of Marie Antoinette, Ludovico Sforza, and others, their hair has grown white in a single night—