The night is come like to the day
The night is come like to the day. Sir Thomas Browne* (1605-1682).
These lines are taken from a poem by Browne published in his Religio Medici (1643). Browne was a doctor in Norwich at a time when members of that profession were suspected of a tendency to scepticism in religion. His book ‘on the religion of a doctor’ has a section near the end of Part II (Everyman edition, 1906, pp. 85-6) in which Browne plays on the traditional comparison of sleep to death (Virgil’s ‘consanguineus leti sopor’), saying of going to sleep that ‘I dare not trust it without my prayers, and a half adieu unto the world, and take my farewell in a colloquy with God.’
The poem is in couplets, 30 lines long,...
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MLA style (see MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing, 3rd Ed.)
. "The night is come like to the day."
The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology. Canterbury Press. Web. 21 Jan. 2026.<
http://www.hymnology.co.uk/t/the-night-is-come-like-to-the-day>.
Chicago style (see The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Ed.)
. "The night is come like to the day."
The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology. Canterbury Press, accessed January 21, 2026,
http://www.hymnology.co.uk/t/the-night-is-come-like-to-the-day.