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"Our little lives are rounded with a sleep."
The various passages cited above prove and illustrate that no author has
written so feelingly, so appreciatingly, as Shakespeare on the subject
of sleep and its loss.
The diligent commentators on his works have investigated laboriously the
sources from which he drew his plots and many of the very lines of his
poems. He was a great borrower; absorbing, digesting, and making his own
much of the material of his predecessors. But it is a noteworthy fact,
that none of the exquisite lines in praise of sleep--that gift which the
Psalmist says the Lord giveth to his beloved--can be traced to other
source than the master. These are jewels of his own; transcripts from
his own mournful experience. In middle life he remembered hopelessly the
tranquil sleep of his lost youth, as
"He that is stricken blind cannot forget
The precious treasure of his eyesight lost."
He had suffered from insomnia, and he writes of this, not "as
imagination bodies forth the forms of things _unknown_," but as one
who, in words burning with indestructible life, lays open to us the
sombre record of what was experience before it was song; who makes us
the sharers of his griefs; who would awaken in the similarly afflicted
of all time that compassionate sympathy which goes out to those whose
burdens are almost greater than they can bear.
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