SUMMER NIGHTS.


If the best of all ways of lengthening our days be to take a few hours
from the night, many of us are involuntarily prolonging existence at the
present hour. Macbeth did not murder sleep more effectually than the hot
weather does. At best, in the sultry nights, most people sleep what is
called "a dog's sleep," and by no means the sleep of a lucky dog. As the
old English writers say, taking a distinction which our language appears
to have lost, we "rather slumber than sleep," waking often, and full of
the foolishest of dreams. This condition of things probably affects
politics and society more than the thoughtless suppose. If literature
produced in the warm, airless fog of July be dull, who can marvel
thereat?

"Of all gods," says Pausanias, "Sleep is dearest to the Muses;" and when
the child of the Muses does not get his regular nine hours' rest (which
he fails to do in warm weather), then his verse and prose are certain to
bear traces of his languor. It is true that all children of the Muses do
not require about double the allowance of the saints. Five hours was all
St. Jerome took, and probably Byron did not sleep much more during the
season when he wrote "Childe Harold." The moderns who agree with the
Locrians in erecting altars to Sleep, can only reply that probably
"Childe Harold" would have been a better poem if Byron had kept more
regular hours when he was composing it. So far they will, perhaps, have
Mr. Swinburne with them, though that author also has Sung before Sunrise,
when he would (if the wisdom of the ancients be correct) have been better
employed in plucking the flower of sleep.