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tents me, ever whispering unto me that I am from my friend, but my friendly dreams in night requite

me,

and make me think I am within his arms. I thank God for my happy dreams as I do for my good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happiness; and surely it is not a melancholy conceit to think we are all asleep in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as mere dreams to those of the next, as the phantasms of the night to the conceits of the day. There is an equal delusion in both, and the one doth but seem to be the emblem or picture of the other; we are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps, and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul. It is the ligation of sense, but the liberty of reason, and our awaking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps. At my nativity my ascendant was the watery sign of Scorpius; I was born in the planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a piece of that leaden planet in me. I am no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company; yet in one dream I can compose a whole comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at

the conceits thereof: were my memory as faithful as my reason is then fruitful, I would never study but in my dreams, and this time also would I choose for my devotions; but our grosser memories have then so little hold of our abstracted understandings, that they forget the story, and can only relate to our awaked souls a confused and broken tale of that that hath passed. Aristotle, who hath written a singular tract of sleep, hath not methinks throughly defined it, nor yet Galen, though he seem to have corrected it; for those noctambuloes and nightwalkers, though in their sleep, do yet enjoy the action of their senses: we must therefore say that there is something in us that is not in the jurisdiction of Morpheus, and that those abstracted and ecstatick souls do walk about in their own corps, as spirits with the bodies they assume; wherein they seem to hear, see, and feel, though indeed the organs are destitute of sense, and their natures of those faculties that should inform them. Thus it is observed that men sometimes upon the hour of their departure, do speak and reason above themselves; for then the soul beginning to be freed from the ligaments of the body, begins to reason like herself, and to discourse in a strain above mortality.

XII. We term sleep a death, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life. 'Tis indeed a part of life that best expresseth death; for every man truly lives so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties of himself; Themistocles therefore that slew his soldier in his sleep, was a merciful executioner, 'tis a kind of punishment the mildness of no laws hath invented; I wonder the fancy of Lucan and Seneca did not discover it. It is that death by which we may be literally said to die daily; a death which Adam died before his mortality; a death whereby we live a middle and moderating point between life and death; in fine, so like death I dare not trust it without my prayers, and an half adieu unto the world, and take my farewell in a colloquy with God.

The night is come, like to the day
Depart not thou great God away!
Let not my sins, black as the night,
Eclipse the lustre of thy light;
Keep still in my horizon, for to me

The sun makes not the day, but thee.
Thou whose nature cannot sleep,

On my temples sentry keep;

Guard me 'gainst those watchful foes,

Whose eyes are open while mine close;

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XII. We term sleep a death, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life. 'Tis indeed a part of life that best expresseth death; for every man truly lives so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties of himself; Themistocles therefore that slew his soldier in his sleep, was a merciful executioner, 'tis a kind of punishment the mildness of no laws hath invented; I wonder the fancy of Lucan and Seneca did not discover it. It is that death by which we may be literally said to die daily; a death which Adam died before his mortality; a death whereby we live a middle and moderating point between life and death; in fine, so like death I dare not trust it without my prayers, and an half adieu unto the world, and take my farewell in a colloquy with God.

The night is come, like to the day
Depart not thou great God away!
Let not my sins, black as the night,
Eclipse the lustre of thy light;

Keep still in my horizon, for to me
The sun makes not the day, but thee.

Thou whose nature cannot sleep,

On my temples sentry keep;

Guard me 'gainst those watchful foes,

Whose eyes are open while mine close;

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