It has been of late years much the fashion in the literature of this
subject to attribute sleeplessness to the rapid growth of facilities for
activities of every kind. The practical annihilation of time and space
by our telegraphs and railroads, the compressing thereby of the labors
of months into hours or even minutes, the terrific competition in all
kinds of business thereby made possible and inevitable, the intense
mental activity engendered in the mad race for fame or wealth, where the
nervous and mental force of man is measured against steam and
lightning,--these are usually credited with having developed what is
considered a modern and even an almost distinctively American disease.
As the maxim, "There is nothing new under the sun," is of general
application, it may be of interest to investigate if an exception occurs
in the case of sleeplessness; if it be true that among our ancestors,
before the days of working steam and electricity, the glorious sleep of
youth was prolonged through all one's three or four score years.
Medical books and literature throw no light upon this subject three
hundred years ago. We must therefore turn to Shakespeare--human
nature's universal solvent--for light on this as we would on any other
question of his time. Was he troubled with insomnia, then, is the first
problem to be solved.
Dr. Holmes, our genial and many-sided poet-laureate, who is also a
philosopher, in his "Life of Emerson," has finely worked out the theory
that no man writes other than his own experience: that consciously or
otherwise an author describes himself in the characters he draws; that
when he loves the character he delineates, it is in some measure his
own, or at least one of which he feels its tendencies and possibilities
belong to himself.
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