Explore "Red Cotton Night-Cap Country; or, Turf and Towers" by Robert Browning on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
And so slipt pleasantly away five years / Of Paradisiac dream; till, as there flit / Premonitory symptoms, pricks of pain, / Because the dreamer has to start awake / And find disease dwelt active all the while / In head or stomach through his night-long sleep, -- / So happened here disturbance to content.
Monsieur Léonce Miranda's last of cares, / Ere he composed himself, had been to make / Provision that, while sleeping safe he lay, / Somebody else should, dragon-like, let fall / Never a lid, coiled round the apple-stem, / But watch the precious fruitage. Somebody / Kept shop, in short, played Paris substitute. / Himself, shrewd, well-trained, early-exercised, / Could take in, at an eye-glance, luck or loss -- / Know commerce throve, though lazily uplift / On elbow merely: leave his bed forsooth? / Such active service was the substitute's.