ho sleeps well need not die so soon,--even as in the
order of Nature he will not. He has that other and rarer half of a good
memory, namely, a good forgetting. For none remembers so ill as he that
remembers all. "A great German scholar affirmed that he knew not what
it was to forget." Better have been born an idiot! An unwashed
memory,--faugh! To us moderns and Americans, therefore, who need
above all things to forget well,--our one imperative want being a
simplification of experience,--to us, more than to all other men, is
requisite, in large measure of benefit, the winnowing-fan of sleep,
sleep with its choices and exclusions, if we would not need the offices
of death too soon.

But a function of yet greater depth and moment remains to be indicated.
Sleep enables the soul not only to shed away that which is foreign,
but to adopt and assimilate whatever is properly its own. Dr. Edward
Johnson, a man of considerable penetration, though not, perhaps, of a
balanced judgment, has a dictum to the effect that the formation of
blood goes on during our waking hours, but the composition of tissue
during those of sleep. I know not upon what grounds of evidence
this statement is made; but one persuades himself that it must be
approximately true of the body, since it is undoubtedly so of the soul.
Under the eye of the sun the fluid elements of character are supplied;
but the final edification takes place beneath the stars. Awake, we
think, feel, act; sleeping, we _become_. Day feeds our consciousness;
night, out of those stores which action has accumulated, nourishes the
vital unconsciousness, the pure unit of the man. During sleep, the valid
and serviceable experience of the day is drawn inward, wrought upon by
spiritual catalysis, transmitted into conviction, sentiment, character,
life, and made part of that which is to attract and assimilate all
subsequent experience. Who, accordingly, has not awaked to find some
problem already solved with which he had vainly grappled on the
preceding day? It is not merely that in the morning our invigorated
powers work more efficiently, and enable us to reach this solution
immediately _after_ awaking. Often, indeed, this occurs; but there are
also numerous instances--and such alone are in point--wherein the work
is complete _before_ one's awakening: not unfrequently it is by the
energy itself of the new perception that the soft bonds of slumber are
first broken; the soul hails its new dawn wi