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

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“As men’s have grown from sudden fears.”2

Mind and body alike suffer from the want of sleep, the spirit is broken, and the fire of the ardent imagination quenched. Who can wonder that when disease or pain has racked and tortured the frame, and prevented a subsidence into a state so natural and necessary to man, he should have resorted to the aid of drugs and potions, whereby to lull his pains, and dispel the care which has banished repose, and woo back again—

“the certain knot of peace,

The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe;

The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,

Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low.”

Leigh Hunt has well said, “It is a delicious moment that of being well nestled in bed, and feeling that you shall drop gently to sleep. The good is to come, not past; the limbs have just been tired enough to render this remaining in one posture delightful; the labour of the day is gone—a gentle failure of the perceptions creeps over you—the spirit of consciousness disengages itself once more, and with slow and hushing degrees, like a mother detaching her hand from that of a sleeping child, the mind seems to have a balmy lid closing over it, like the eye—it is closed—the mysterious spirit has gone to take its airy rounds.”