From the warning glare of sunlight the
heart shuts close its secrets; but hours like these beguile from its
inmost depths those subtile emotions, and vague, dreamy, delicious
thoughts, which, like plants, waken to life only beneath the protecting
shadows of darkness. "Why is it," says Richter, "that the night puts
warmer love in our hearts? Is it the nightly pressure of helplessness,
or is it the exalting separation from the turmoils of life,--that
veiling of the world in which for the soul nothing then remains but
souls,--that causes the letters in which loved names are written to
appear like phosphorus-writing by night, on _fire_, while day, in
their cloudy traces, they but _smoke_?"
Insensibly we wandered into one of those weird passages of
psychological speculation, the border territory where reason and
illusion hold contested sway,--where the relations between spirit and
matter seem so incomprehensibly involved and complicated that we can
only feel, without being able to analyze them, and even the old words
created for our coarse material needs seem no more suitable than would
a sparrow's wings for the flight of an eagle.
"It is emphatically true of these themes," I remarked, after a long
rambling talk, half reverie, half reason, "that language conceals the
ideas, or, rather, the imaginations they evolve; for the word idea
implies something more tangible than vagaries which the Greek poet
would have called 'the dream of the shadow of smoke.
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