It is not my design to drink or to sleep, but my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.

The line expresses a deliberate refusal of comfort or delay in favor of urgent action—an insistence that rest and ordinary bodily needs are secondary to a pressing duty. Read as Cromwellian rhetoric, it fits the persona of a commander or statesman who frames haste as moral seriousness: to “drink or to sleep” would be to indulge, while to “make what haste I can” signals resolve and discipline. The phrasing also suggests a leave-taking under constraint, as if the speaker is in company where hospitality is offered but must be declined because the larger mission demands immediate departure.