For many a weary day, and restless night, Death himself--and how much more appalling his aspect _here_, than when faced manfully in open day, with the pulses strong, and the animal spirits in brisk circulation, amidst a goodly fellowship of brave companions!--yea, Death himself hath shaken his uplifted dart over his prostrate victim from out the heart-depressing twilight of a sick-room; yet the hand of the grim feature was held, that he should not smite. And, oh! who can tell the misery and crushing disappointment of the soul, awaking to the consciousness of a dangerous illness, from feverish and troubled sleep--such sleep as the overworked mariner sinks into, his lullaby the howling of the storm, and roaring of the breakers, even when his vessel is on the rocks, with the tumbling seas raging in multitudinous ebb and flow amongst their black and slippery tangle-capped pinnacles, and the yeasty foam-flakes, belched from their flinty caverns, falling thickly on his drenched garments--sleep, wherein, most like, he meets the friends of his youth, who have long gone before him to their account, and wanders in imagination with them (all his recent sufferings and actual danger, for a brief but blessed moment, utterly forgotten) through the quiet valleys and happy scenes of his boyhood, never to be by him again revisited--sleep, from which he is only roused to all the horrors of his actual situation by the gritty rasping of the shattered hull as it is thundered down with every send of the sea on the sharp rocks, the groaning of the loosened timbers, the crashing and creaking of the falling masts, the lumbering and rasping and rattling of the wreck alongside, entangled by the rigging and loose ropes, that surges up in foaming splashes, as if chafing to break adrift, and the cries of his shipmates--and thus wrenched from Elysium, to find himself "even as a man wrecked upon a sand, that looks to be washed off next tide?" _That_ can he; and although his riven vessel has for the moment been hove off the rocks, and rides clear of the reefs and broken water to leeward, it may be by the mere reverberation of the ground-swell,--yet he knows his only remaining cable is three parts chafed, and that, although he may hang on by the single strand for an anxious day or two, part it must at last. However, it has pleased Heaven, even when the weather was at the worst and darkest, and the wind raging at the loudest, and the mountainous seas at the highest, to break away, and lance forth a beam of blessed sunshine, which, breaking on his soul, might comfort him.