A MIDNIGHT RAMBLE. 23 
The sleepiest beds in the garden, at least as to the flowers, 
will be found among the poppies. 
“Not poppy, nor mandragora, 
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, 
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep 
Which thou ow’dst yesterday,” 
mutters Iago to Othello. The poppy, “lord of the land of dreams,” 
sets a beautiful example of that somnolence for which it is itself 
the emblem and ministering nepenthe. 
In a recent moonlight stroll in Switzerland I visited the 
poppies in their native haunts, the common wild species whose 
flaming scarlet sets the foreign summer fields ablaze in the mid- 
day sun. But I found their fires now smouldering beneath the 
dew, and giving no token beneath the moon, for the blossoms 
were closed in luxurious slumber. 
“How many thousand of my poorest subjects 
Are at this hour asleep !” 
moans Shakespeare’s king. 
“O sleep! O gentle sleep! 
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, 
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down, 
And steep my senses in forgetfulness ?” 
What a device of mockery had our midnight poppy proved to 
this monarch with “uneasy head,” who wooed in vain, and even 
traduced, the “dull god sleep” that should affiliate with the 
“happy low” and shun “the kingly couch” —the “canopies of 
costly state” in the “perfumed chambers of the great”! For 
is not the crowned head of this poppy “pavilioned richer than 
the proudest king’s”? its sleep lulled in its own drowsy incense, in 
luxurious “perfumed chambers,” curtained in canopies of lustrous 
damask ? 
In the dim moonlight I beheld thousands of these folded 
