Shelley’s opening of “Queen Mab” is a stock quotation: “How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep! one pale as yonder waning moon, with lips of lurid blue; the other rosy as the morn when, throned on ocean’s wave, it blushes o’er the world: yet both so passing wonderful!” But where, asks a prose writer of genius, where, in the sharp lineaments of rigid and unsightly death, is the calm beauty of slumber, telling of rest for the waking hours that are past, and gentle hopes and loves for those which are to come? “Lay death and sleep down, side by side, and say who shall find the two akin.” But this is selecting such an aspect of mortality as comes not within the poet’s purview. Prosaical in every fibre is Sancho Panza meant to be; yet in his famous invocation of blessings on the invention, or rather on the inventor, of sleep, which, quoth he, “covers a man all over, body and mind, like a cloak”—for Sancho has his poetical moods and tenses after all—he goes on to recognise the affinity which poetry so freely asserts: “It [sleep] has only one fault, as I have heard say, which is, that it looks like death: for between the sleeper and the corpse there is but little to choose.” Shakspeare’s Iachimo calls sleep the “ape of death.” To die, to sleep,—muses Hamlet,—no more; and, by a sleep, to say we end the heart-ache, and the thousand natural ills that flesh is heir to, were a consummation devoutly to be wished. “Thy best of rest is sleep,” soliloquizes the duke in “Measure for Measure,” “And that thou oft provokest; yet grossly fear’st Thy death, which is no more.” A couplet of Butler’s, in a description of nightfall, tells how ... “sleep the wearied world relieved, By counterfeiting death revived.” A Greek proverb designates sleep “the minor mysteries of death”—in allusion to the lesser Eleusinian mysteries as compared with the greater: “ὕπος τὰ μικρὰ τοῦ θανάτου μυστήρια.” Sir Thomas Overbury calls sleep, death’s picture drawn to the life, or the twilight of life and death. “In sleep we kindly shake death by the hand; but when we are awaked, we will not know him.” With the closing clause of this sentence compare the closing lines in the following picture by Byron, of man o’erlaboured with his being’s strife, shrinking to “that sweet forgetfulness of life” which sleep induces: “There lie love’s feverish hope and cunning’s guile, Hate’s working brain, and lull’d ambition’s wile; O’er each vain eye oblivion’s pinions wave, And quench’d existence crouches in a grave. What better name may slumber’s bed become? Night’s sepulchre, the universal home, Where weakness, strength, vice, virtue, sunk supine, Alike in naked helplessness recline; Glad for awhile to heave unconscious breath, Yet wake to wrestle with the dread of death, And shun, though day but dawn on ills increast, That sleep, the loveliest, since it dreams the least.”