One of, and not the least fearful of, the curses denounced against Byron’s Manfred is, that to him shall Night deny all the quiet of her sky; and the day shall have a sun which shall make him wish it done. Crabbe’s Tale of Edward Shore has to tell how, at one stage of that sombre career,— “Struck by new terrors, from his friends he fled, And wept his woes upon a restless bed; Retiring late, at early hour to rise, With shrunken features, and with bloodshot eyes; If sleep one moment closed the dismal view, Fancy her terrors built upon the true; And night and day had their alternate woes, That baffled pleasure, and that mocked repose.” The hero of one popular prose fiction describes himself as lying awake night after night, quivering with his great sorrow—wishing that the first dull grey of morning would appear at the window; and when it came, longing for night and darkness once more. Of the heroine in another we read that “the terrible ‘demon of the bed,’ that invests our lightest sorrows with such hopeless and crushing anxiety, reigned triumphant over its gentle victim; and yet, when the daylight crept through her uncurtained windows, she shrunk from it, as though in her broken spirit she preferred to hide her distress in the gloom of night, fearful and unrelieved as was its dark dominion.” How sickening, how dark, exclaims Keats, in the fantastic diction of “Endymion,” “the dreadful leisure of weary days, made deeper exquisite by a foreknowledge of unslumbrous night!” Mr. Tennyson pictures to us the simple maid Elaine, who went half the night repeating, Must she die? “And now to right she turned, and now to left, And found no ease in turning or in rest”— like one of those depicted by Keble— “... who darkling and alone, Would wish the weary night were gone, Though dawning morn should only show The secret of their unknown woe.” Shelley sings of the desire “of the night for the morrow” when expressing the devotion to something afar from the sphere of our sorrow. Gray vividly depicts the state of mind of one who— “... starts from short slumbers, and wishes for morning— To close his dull eyes when he sees it returning.” Of Mrs. Gaskell’s Jemima we read, that “the night, the sleepless night, was so crowded and haunted by miserable images, that she longed for day; and when day came, with its stinging realities, she wearied and grew sick for the solitude of night.” So with Shenstone’s Jessie:— “Amid the dreary gloom of night I cry, When will the morn’s once pleasing scenes return? Yet what can morn’s returning ray supply, But foes that triumph, or but friends that mourn?” _BUYER’S BARGAIN AND BOAST._ PROVERBS xx. 14.