, during this Christmas solstice), to be the very earliest hour
at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To think of
it, we say; for to do it in earnest requires another half hour's good
consideration. Not but there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told,
and such like gauds abroad in the world in summer-time especially,
some hours before what we have assigned, which a gentleman may see, as
they say, only for getting up. But having been tempted once or twice,
in earlier life, to assist at those ceremonies, we confess our
curiosity abated. We are no longer ambitious of being the sun's
courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours of
the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances; which have in
them, besides, something pagan and Persic. To say truth, we never
anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as 'tis called),
to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we
suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and
headaches; Nature herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our
presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the
measures of that celestial and sleepless traveler. We deny not that
there is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially,
in these break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of
a lazy world, to conquer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of
sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually, in strange qualms
before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion.

Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their
clothes, or are already up and about their occupations, content to
have swallowed their sleep by wholesale, we choose to linger abed, and
digest our dreams. It is the very time to recombine the wandering
images which night in a confused mass presented; to snatch them from
forgetfulness; to shape and mold them. Some people have no good of
their dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly to taste
them curiously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to
collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again,
with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to drag into
daylight a struggling and half-vanishing nightmare; to handle and
examine the terrors or the airy solaces. We have too much respect for
these spiritual communications to let them go so lightly. We are not
so stupid or so careless as