Quotes
Quotes about Sleep
The harvest of a quiet eye,
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source,
The rapt one, of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth:
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth.
Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking,
Morn of toil nor night of waking.
Jock, when ye hae naething else to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, when ye 're sleeping.
Night is the time to weep,
To wet with unseen tears
Those graves of memory where sleep
The joys of other years.
Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole.
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.
Thou hast been called, O sleep! the friend of woe;
But 't is the happy that have called thee so.
Oh, breathe not his name! let it sleep in the shade,
Where cold and unhonour'd his relics are laid,
The harp that once through Tara's halls
The soul of music shed,
Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls
As if that soul were fled.
So sleeps the pride of former days,
So glory's thrill is o'er;
And hearts that once beat high for praise
Now feel that pulse no more.
But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!
Did ye not hear it?--No! 't was but the wind,
Or the car rattling o'er the stony street.
On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar,
Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore.
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.
How wonderful is Death!
Death and his brother Sleep.
Heaven's ebon vault
Studded with stars unutterably bright,
Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls,
Seems like a canopy which love has spread
To curtain her sleeping world.
The cold winds swept the mountain-height,
And pathless was the dreary wild,
And 'mid the cheerless hours of night
A mother wandered with her child:
As through the drifting snows she press'd,
The babe was sleeping on her breast.
Asleep in lap of legends old.
She no tear--O shed no tear!
The flower will bloom another year.
Weep no more--O weep no more!
Young buds sleep in the root's white core.
Mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores.
Hail to the land whereon we tread,
Our fondest boast!
The sepulchres of mighty dead,
The truest hearts that ever bled,
Who sleep on glory's brightest bed,
A fearless host:
No slave is here:--our unchained feet,
Walk freely as the waves that beat
Our coast.
A baby was sleeping,
Its mother was weeping,
For her husband was far on the wild-raging sea.
Our very hopes belied our fears,
Our fears our hopes belied;
We thought her dying when she slept,
And sleeping when she died.
Wherever literature consoles sorrow or assuages pain; wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,--there is exhibited in its noblest form the immortal influence of Athens.
