June 29.
Sleep
Sleep means unconsciousness: unconsciousness is a solemn state — you get it for example from a blow on the head with a mallet. It always weightily impresses me to see someone asleep — especially someone I love as to-day, stretched out as still as a log — who perhaps a few minutes ago was alive, even animated. And there is nothing so welcome, unless it be the sunrise, as the first faint gleam of recognition in the half -opened eye when consciousness like a mighty river begins to flow in and restore our love to us again.
When I go to bed myself, I sometimes jealously guard my faculties from being filched away by sleep. I almost fear sleep: it makes me apprehensive — this wonderful and unknowable Thing which is going to happen to me for which I must lay myself out on a bed and wait, with an elaborate preparedness. Unlike Sir Thomas Browne, I am not always so content to take my leave of the sun and sleep, if need be, into the resurrection. And I some- times lie awake and wonder when the mysterious Visitor will come to me and call me away from this thrilling world, and how He does it, to wliich end I try to remain conscious of the gradual process and to understand it: an impossibility of course involving a contradiction in terms. So I shall never know, nor will anybody else,
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