The child, not asleep, but passing through the hours of sleep and their
dominions, knows that the mood of night will have its hour; he puts off
his troubled heart, and will answer it another time, in the other state,
by day. "I shall be able to bear this when I am grown up" is not oftener
in a young child's mind than "I shall endure to think of it in the day-
time." By this he confesses the double habit and double experience, not
to be interchanged, and communicating together only by memory and hope.

Perhaps it will be found that to work all by day or all by night is to
miss something of the powers of a complex mind. One might imagine the
rhythmic experience of a poet, subject, like a child, to the time, and
tempering the extremities of either state by messages of remembrance and
expectancy.

Never to have had a brilliant dream, and never to have had any delirium,
would be to live too much in the day; and hardly less would be the loss
of him who had not exercised his waking thought under the influence of
the hours claimed by dreams. And as to choosing between day and night,
or guessing whether the state of day or dark is the truer and the more
natural, he would be rash who should make too sure.

In order to live the life of night, a watcher must not wake too much.
That is, he should not alter so greatly the character of night as to lose
the solitude, the visible darkness, or the quietude. The hours of sleep
are too much altered when they are filled by lights and crowds; and
Nature is cheated so, and evaded, and her rhythm broken, as when the
larks caged in populous streets make ineffectual springs and sing
daybreak songs when the London gas is lighted. Nature is easily
deceived; and the muse, like the lark, may be set all astray as to the
hour. You may spend the peculiar hours of sleep amid so much noise and