of it in the day-
time." By this he confesses the double habit and double experience, not
to be interchanged, and communicating together only by memory and hope.

Perhaps it will be found that to work all by day or all by night is to
miss something of the powers of a complex mind. One might imagine the
rhythmic experience of a poet, subject, like a child, to the time, and
tempering the extremities of either state by messages of remembrance and
expectancy.

Never to have had a brilliant dream, and never to have had any delirium,
would be to live too much in the day; and hardly less would be the loss
of him who had not exercised his waking thought under the influence of
the hours claimed by dreams. And as to choosing between day and night,
or guessing whether the state of day or dark is the truer and the more
natural, he would be rash who should make too sure.

In order to live the life of night, a watcher must not wake too much.
That is, he should not alter so greatly the character of night as to lose
the solitude, the visible darkness, or the quietude. The hours of sleep
are too much altered when they are filled by lights and crowds; and
Nature is cheated so, and evaded, and her rhythm broken, as when the
larks caged in populous streets make ineffectual springs and sing
daybreak songs when the London gas is lighted. Nature is easily
deceived; and the muse, like the lark, may be set all astray as to the
hour. You may spend the peculiar hours of sleep amid so much noise and
among so many people that you shall not be aware of them; you may thus
merely force and prolong the day. But to do so is not to live well both
lives; it is not to yield to the daily and nightly rise and fall and to
be cradled in the swing of change.

There surely never was a poet but was now and then rocked in such a
cradle of alternate hours. "It cannot be," says Herbert, "that I am he
on whom Thy tempests fell all night."

It is in the hours of sleep that the mind, by some divine paradox, has
the extremest sense of light. Almost the most shining lines in English
poetry--lines that cast sunrise shadows--are those of Blake, written
confessedly from the side of night, the side of sorrow and dreams, and
those dreams the dreams of little chimney-sweepers; all is as dark as he
can make it with the "bags of soot"; but the boy's dream of the green
plain and the river is too bright for day. So, indeed, is another
brightness of Blake's, which i