Let us, then, instead of striving so strenuously to remember all we read, be grateful that we can occasionally forget. Mr. Samuel Pepys, who knew how to extract a fair share of pleasure out of life, frankly admits that he delighted in seeing an old play over again, because he was wise enough to commit none of it to memory; and Mr. Lang, who gives _his_ vote to “Pepys’s Diary” as the very prince of bedside books, the one “which may send a man happily to sleep with a smile on his lips,” declares it owes its fitness for this post to the ease with which it can be forgotten. “Your deeds and misdeeds,” he writes, “your dinners and kisses, glide from our recollections, and being read again, surprise and amuse us afresh. Compared with you, Montaigne is dry, Boswell is too full of matter; but one can take you up anywhere, and anywhere lay you down, certain of being diverted by the picture of that companion with whom you made your journey through life.... You are perpetually the most amusing of gossips, and, of all who have gossiped about themselves, the only one who tells the truth.”
And the poets allied with Hermes and happy slumber,--who are they? Mr. Browning is surely not one of the kindly group. I would as lief read Mr. George Meredith’s prose as Mr. Browning’s verse in that hour of effortless enjoyment. But Wordsworth holds some placid moments in his keeping, and we may wander on simple errands by his side, taking good care never to listen to philosophy, but only looking at all he shows us, until our hearts are surfeited with pleasure, and the golden daffodils dance drowsily before our closing eyes. Keats belongs to dreamier moods, when, as we read, the music of his words, the keen creative magic of his style, lure us away from earth. We leave the darkness of night, and the grayness of morning. We cease thinking, and are content to feel. It is an elfin storm we hear beating against the casement; it is the foam of fairy seas that washes on the shore.
“Blissfully havened both from joy and pain,”
wrapped in soft, slumberous satisfaction, we are but vaguely conscious of the enchanted air we breathe, or of our own unutterable well-being. There is no English poem, save only “Christabel,” which can lead us like “The Eve of St. Agnes” straight to the ivory gates, and waft us gently from waking dreams to the mistier visions of sleep. But there are many English poets--Herrick, and Marvell, and Gray, and Cowper, and Tennyson--who have bedside verses for us all. Herrick, indeed, though breathing the freshness of morning, is a delightful companion for night. He calls us so distinctly and seductively to leave, as he did, the grievous cares of life; to close our ears to the penetrating voice of duty; to turn away our eyes from the black scaffold of King Charles; and to watch, with him, the blossoms shaken in the April wind, and the whitethorn of May time blooming on the hills, and the sheen of Julia’s robe, as she goes by with laughter. This is not a voice to sway us at broad noon, when we are striving painfully to do our little share of work; but Hesperus should bring some respite even to the dutiful, and in our dozy hours it is sweet to lay aside all labor, and keenness, and altruism. Adonis, says the old myth, fled from the amorous arms of Aphrodite to the cold Queen of Shadows who could promise him nothing but repose. Worn with passion, wearied of delight, he lay at the feet of Persephone, and bartered away youth, strength, and love for the waters of oblivion and the coveted blessing of sleep.