The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-08-18
Going To Sleep
By DR. RRANR oRANE

of all the honeyed gifts of heaven vouch. sated to sinful and unworthy mortals the dearest, most priceless and most ethereal is the experience known as going to sleep."
 Other treasures of joy, such as eating and drinking, playing and working, worshipping and laughing, together with all and sundry other grateful affiliations of either physical or spiritual senses, may be ikened to vessels or gold and silver, precious stones and heavy cloths ;Abut this is like prized thing of fiImy lace, woven of Scobwebs and starshine, worth It's weight ten times over in diamonds. ss
 The thoughts of daytime may be sweet. hut cannot compare with that Linked sweetness long drawn out of those thoughts that slowly step the fairy trail from consciousneEs to dreams.
 No poems read by our wide-awake eyes are so steeped in the very ichor of CalIiope. Euterpe, Thalia, and Erato,. the four sister goddesses of poesy, as are the sloping fancies that wander down to sleep
 It is the sinfulest of men,s sins that tboy trample under foot the good things of Cod when they became common. So we strucala, for strange ecstasies and new sensations while we despise this most exquisite of pleas ures
 . For what are the hot kisses of passion te the kisses of Morpheus when he sets tbem upon the soul and draws it away into the IeatneFed darkness of utter rest? And what are all theatr1c speetacles@an cinematographic trlcks. and views of landscape or the settihx sun to the kaleidoscopic visions that come to us as we fade away with the gray brother of death into the shadow-woods of nothing where the hard and actual ideas of day and reason dissolve into rainbows of unreason and moon-shimmeF, or crystalline into frost-fIoV CTS upon the window-pane that overlooks tb, infinite unknown; where the imperfections of reality change into milleniSl benuty, and the scene shifts from this annoying world to ths happy valley of Utopia; where we move from the sOrdid house of our poverty to our caste in the air, to the murmur of Scheherazade's voice walk the streets of colopful Bagtad wit, the good .Caliph Haroun al Raschid. or to the music of saints prayers become citizens of Kingdom Come?
 Dante in his concluding lines of the eiyb. teenth canto of ''Purgatory' depicts the ae. tion of the mind in falling asleep as if the dream-thought entered among the wake thoughts and spread as tree putting forth Within me new thought did,entrance. find. Whence others many and diverse were born. And So l lapsed from one into another, That in reverie mine eyes closed
 And thought became transmuted into dream.
 We never appreciate the good things of life until we miss them.- There's d deal of truth in that old platitnde Let the shf,- wrecked sailor tell of the price of q goblet of pure water, the famishsd prisoner of the tast. of bread, and the lonely exile of the joys of home; but if you want a sip of the full cup of nervous horror ask the victim of insomnia how it feels to glare with unclosed eyes at the stone face of night, and what he would give to be healthy, tiEed child again and have that delicious quarter of an hour lying in bed
 Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppressed The soothed hmbs and soul fatigued away, As though rose should shut and be- bud
 again.