those dreams that you say are daily escaping you?

SCRIPTOR. Ah! so speaks the energetic man, eager to take the world on
his shoulders. I know the images of death that please you,
Lector--such as that great one of Arnold's, about 'the sounding
labour-house vast of being.'

But, Lector, you who love work so well--have you never heard tell of
a thing called Rest? Have you never known what it is to be tired, my
Lector?--not tired at the end of a busy day, but tired in the morning,
tired in the Memnonian sunlight, when larks and barrel-organs start on
their blithe insistent rounds. No, the man who is tired of a morning
sings not music-hall songs in his bedroom as he dashes about in his
morning bath. But will you never want to go to bed, Lector? Will you
be always like the children who hate to be sent to bed, and think that
when they are grown up they will never go to bed at all? Yet in a few
years' time how glad they are of the stray chance of bed at ten. May
it not be so with sleep's twin-brother? In our young vigour, driven by
a hundred buoyant activities, enticed by dream on dream, time seems so
short for all we think we have to do; but surely when the blood begins
to thin, and the heart to wax less extravagantly buoyant, when comfort
croons a kettle-song whose simple spell no sirens of ambition or
romance can overcome--don't you think that then 'bedtime' will come to
seem the best hour of the day, and 'Death as welcome as a friend would
fall'?

LECTOR. But you are no fair judge, Scriptor. You say my health, my
youth, as you waggishly call it, puts me out of court. Yet surely your
ill-health and low spirits just as surely vitiate your judgment?