Sleep is the single happiness of the unhappy  

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"Sleep is often the single happiness of the unhappy" is a dictum by Goya. It is the caption of the print "Las rinde el sueño"[1] and is preceded by the words "Do not wake them."

Charles Yriarte remarks that this is the only calm and consoling phrase to be found in Goya. This is reported by Hugh Stokes in Francisco Goya : a study of the work and personality of the eighteenth century Spanish painter and satirist (1914).

Hugh Stokes comments:

"The same idea is repeatedly expressed by our Elizabethans. Sir Philip Sidney calls sleep " the certain knot of peace . . . the balm of woe . . . the prisoner's release." Shakespeare writes of the " sleep that sometimes shuts up sorrow's eye . . . that knits up the ravelled slave of care . . . sore labour's bath, balm of hurt minds." "

Stokes refers to Sidney's "Come Sleep, O Sleep!" and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

See also

the discrepancy between the apparent gloom and doom of Goya's work with the supposed lightness of his spirits




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