Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1924-08-23
GOING TO SLEEP
By DR.. Frank Crane

~ F ALL the honeyed gifts of heaven vouch.
I J safed 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, worshipLng
and laughing, together with all and sundry
other grateful affiliations of either physical
or spiritual senses, may be lkened to vessels
of gold and silyet, precious stones and heavy
cloths; but this is like priced thing of fimy
lace woven of cobwebs and starshine, worth
its weight 10 times in diamonds
The thoughts of daytime may be sweet but
cannot compare with that linked sweetness
long drawn OUT of those thoughts that slowly
step the fairy trail from consciousness to
dreamss
No poems read by wide-awake eyes are
so stepped in the very ichor of CalIiope
Euterpe, Thalia, and Erato the four sister
goddesses of poesy, the sloping fancies
that wander down to Sleep
1t is the sinfulest of mems sins that thew
trample under foot the good things of God
when they became common So we struggle
for strange ecstasies and new sensations.
while we despise this most exquisite of
pleasures
For what are the hot kisses of passion to
the Kisses of Morpheus when he sets them
upon the soul and draws it away into the
are all theatric spectacles and cinematographic
tricks and views Of landscape or the setting
sun to the kaleidoscope 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
simmer, crystalline into frost-flowers up
on the window-Lane that overlooks the infinite
unknown; where the imperfections Of reality
change into mi11ennial heautv and tho ccon,
shifts from this annoying world to the happy
valley of Utopia; where move from the
sordid house Of our poverty to our castle in
the air, to the murmur Of Scheherazade svice
walk the streets Of colorful Ragdad with the
good Caliph Haroun al Raschd, or to the
music of saints prayers become citizens Of
Kingdom Come?
Dante in his concluding lines of the
eighteenth canto Of "Purgatory" dep1cts the
action of the mind in falling asleep as is the
dream-thought entered among the wake
thoughts and spread tree putting forth
branches
Within me a new thought did entrance find,
Whence others many and diverse born,
And so 1 Iapsed from one into another,
That in a reverie mine eyes | closed,
And thought became transmitted into dream.
We never appreciate the good things Of life
until we miss them. There's deal of truth
in that old platitude. Let the shipwrecked
sailor tell Of the price Of a goblet Of pure
water, the famished prisoner of the taste of
bread. and the lonely exile of the joys OF
home but il you want a sip of the full cup
of nervous horror ask the victim of insomnia
how it feels otgare with Enclosed eyes at the
stone face Of night, and what he would give
to be healthy, tired child again and have
that delicious quarter Of an hour lying in bed
Until the popped warmth Of sleep oppressed
The soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away,
AS though should shut and be bud
again.
(COpyright 1924)