When I awoke this morning and saw the sunlight streaming over the valley and the beech woods glowing with the rich fires of autumn, and heard the ducks clamouring for their breakfast, and felt all the kindly intimacies of life coming back in a flood for the new day, I felt, as the Americans say, “good.” Waking up is always—given a clear conscience, a good digestion, and a healthy faculty of sleep—a joyous experience. It has the pleasing excitement with which the tuning up of the fiddles of the orchestra prior to the symphony affects you. It is like starting out for a new adventure, or coming into an unexpected inheritance, or falling in love, or stumbling suddenly upon some author whom you have unaccountably missed and who goes to your heart like a brother. In short, it is like anything that is sudden and beautiful and full of promise.

But waking up can never have been quite so intoxicating a joy as it is now that peace has come back to the earth. It is in the first burst of consciousness that you feel the full measure of the great thing that has happened in the world. It is like waking from an agonising nightmare and realising with a glorious surge of happiness that it was not true. The fact that the nightmare from which we have awakened now was true does not diminish our happiness. It deepens it, extends it, projects it into the future. We see a long, long vista of days before us, and on awaking to each one of them we shall know afresh that the nightmare is over, that the years of the Great Killing are passed, that the sun is shining and the birds are singing in a friendly world, and that men are going forth to their labour until the evening without fear and without hate. As the day advances and you get submerged in its petty affairs and find it is very much like other days the emotion passes. But in that moment when you step over the threshold of sleep into the living world the revelation is simple, immediate, overwhelming. The shadow has passed. The devil is dead. The delirium is over and sanity is coming back to the earth. You recall the far different emotions of a few brief months ago when the morning sun woke you with a sinister smile, and the carolling of the birds seemed pregnant with sardonic irony, and the news in the paper spoiled your breakfast. You thank heaven that you are not the Kaiser. Poor wretch, he is waking, too, probably about this time and wondering what will happen to him before nightfall, wondering where he will spend the miserable remnant of his days, wondering whether his great ancestor's habit of carrying a dose of poison was not after all a practice worth thinking about. He wanted the whole, earth, and now he is discovering that he is entitled to just six feet of it—the same as the lowliest peasant in his land. “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests,” but there is neither hole nor nest where he will be welcome. There is not much joy for him in waking to a new day.

But perhaps he doesn't wake. Perhaps, like Macbeth, he has “murdered Sleep,” and is suffering the final bankruptcy of life. A man may lose a crown and be all the better, but to lose the faculty of sleep is to enter the kingdom of the damned. If you or I were offered a new lease of life after our present lease had run out and were told that we could nominate our gifts what would be our first choice? Not a kingdom, nor an earldom, nor even succession to an O.B.E. There was a period of my childhood when I thought I should have liked to have been born a muffin man, eternally perambulating the streets ringing a bell, carrying a basket on my head and shouting “Muffins,” in the ears of a delighted populace. I loved muffins and I loved bells, and here was a man who had those joys about him all day long and every day. But now my ambitions are more restrained. I would no more wish to be born a muffin man than a poet or an Archbishop. The first gift I should ask would be something modest. It would be the faculty of sleeping eight solid hours every night, and waking each morning with the sense of unfathomable and illimitable content with which I opened my eyes to the world to-day.

All the functions of nature are agreeable, though views may differ as to their relative pleasure. A distinguished man, whose name I forget, put eating first, “for,” said he, “there is no other pleasure that comes three times a day and lasts an hour each time.” But sleep lasts eight hours. It fills up a good third of the time we spend here and it fills it up with the divinest of all balms. It is the very kingdom of democracy. “All equal are within the church's gate,” said George Herbert. It may have been so in George Herbert's parish; but it is hardly so in most parishes. It is true of the Kingdom of Sleep. When you enter its portals all discriminations vanish, and Hodge and his master, the prince and the pauper, are alike clothed in the royal purple and inherit the same golden realm. There is more harmony and equality in life than wre are apt to admit. For a good twenty-five years of our seventy we sleep (and even snore) with an agreement that is simply wonderful.

And the joy of waking up is not less generously distributed. What delight is there like throwing off the enchantment of sleep and seeing the sunlight streaming in at the window and hearing the happy jangle of the birds, or looking out on the snow-covered landscape in winter, or the cherry blossom in spring, or the golden fields of harvest time, or (as now) upon the smouldering fires of the autumn woodlands? Perhaps the day will be as thorny and full of disappointments and disillusions as any that have gone before. But no matter. In this wonder of waking there is eternal renewal of the spirit, the inexhaustible promise of the best that is still to come, the joy of the new birth that experience cannot stale nor familiarity make tame.

That singer of our time, who has caught most perfectly the artless note of the birds themselves, has uttered the spirit of joyous waking that all must feel on this exultant morning—

Good morning, Life—and all

Things glad and beautiful.

My pockets nothing hold,

But he that owns the gold,

The Sun, is my great friend—

His spending has no end.

Let us up, brothers, and greet the sun and hear the ringing of the bells. There has not been such royal waking since the world began.

It is an agreeable fancy of some that eternity itself will be a thing of sleep and happy awakenings. It is a cheerful faith that solves a certain perplexity. For however much we cling to the idea of immortality, we can hardly escape an occasional feeling of concern as to how we shall get through it. We shall not “get through it,” of course, but speech is only fashioned for finite things. Many men, from Pascal to Byron, have had a sort of terror of eternity. Byron confessed that he had no terror of a dreamless sleep, but that he could not conceive an eternity of consciousness which would not be unendurable. We are cast in a finite mould and think in finite terms, and we cling to the thought of immortality less perhaps from the desire to enjoy it for ourselves than from fear of eternal separation from the companionship of those whose love and friendship we would fain believe to be deathless. For this perplexity the fancy of which I speak offers a solution. An eternity of happy awakenings would be a pleasant compromise between being and not being. I can conceive no more agreeable lot through eternity, than

To dream as I may,

And awake when I will,

With the song of the bird,

And the sun on the hill.

Was it not Wilfred Scawen Blunt who contemplated an eternity in which, once in a hundred years, he would wake and say, “Are you there, beloved?” and hear the reply, “Yes, beloved, I am here,” and with that sweet assurance lapse into another century of forgetfulness? The tenderness and beauty of the idea were effectually desecrated by Alfred Austin, whom some one in a jest made Poet Laureate. “For my part,” he said, “I should like to wake once in a hundred years and hear news of another victory for the British Empire.” It would not be easy to invent a more perfect contrast between the feeling of a poet and the simulated passion of a professional patriot. He did not really think that, of course. He was simply a timid, amiable little man who thought it was heroic and patriotic to think that. He had so habituated his tiny talent to strutting about in the grotesque disguise of a swashbuckler that it had lost all touch with the primal emotions of poetry. Forgive me for intruding him upon the theme. The happy awakenings of eternity must outsoar the shadow of our night, its slayings and its vulgar patriotisms. If they do not do that, it will be better to sleep on.

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