Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 September 1881 — Soothing Repose. [ARTICLE]

Soothing Repose.

The day emphatically belongs to earth; we yield it without reluctance to care and labor. We toil, we drudge, we pant, we play the hack-horse ; we do things smilingly from which we recoil in secret; we pass by sweet spots and rare faces that our very heart yearns for, without betraying the effect it costs; find thus we drag through the twelve long hours, disgusted almost, but gladdened withal, that the mask will have an end, and the tedious game be over, and our visor and onr weapons are laid aside. But the night brings freedom and repose ; its influence falls cooly and gratefully upon the mind as well as the body; and when drops the extinguisher upon the light which glimmers upon the round, untouched pillow, we, at the same time, put out a world of care and perplexities. Leigh Hunt says: “It is a delicious moment certainly, that of being well nestled in bed, and feeling that you shall drop gently to sleep. The good is to come, not past; the limbs have just been tiled enough to render the remaining in one posture delightful; the labor of the day is done. A gentle failure of the perceptions comes creeping over one; the spirit of consciousness disengages itself more and more, with slow and hushing degrees, like a mother detaching her hand from her sleeping cfiild; the mind seems to have a balmy lid over it, like the eye ; ’tis closing—more closing —’tis closed. The mysterious spirit has gone to make its airy rounds.”