We could never quite understand the philosophy of this arrangement,
or the wisdom of our ancestors in sending us for instruction to
these woolly bedfellows. A sheep, when it is dark, has nothing to do
but to shut his silly eyes, and sleep if he can. Man found out long
sixes.--Hail candle-light! without disparagement to sun or moon, the
kindliest luminary of the three--if we may not rather style thee their
radiant deputy, mild viceroy of the moon!--We love to read, talk, sit
silent, eat, drink, sleep, by candle-light. They are every body's sun
and moon. This is our peculiar and household planet. Wanting it, what
savage unsocial nights must our ancestors have spent, wintering in
caves and unillumined fastnesses! They must have lain about and
grumbled at one another in the dark. What repartees could have passed,
when you must have felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbour's
cheek to be sure that he understood it? This accounts for the
seriousness of the elder poetry. It has a sombre cast (try Hesiod or
Ossian), derived from the tradition of those unlantern'd nights. Jokes
came in with candles. We wonder how they saw to pick up a pin, if they
had any. How did they sup? what a melange of chance carving they must
have made of it!--here one had got a leg of a goat, when he wanted
a horse's shoulder--there another had dipt his scooped palm in a
kid-skin of wild honey, when he meditated right mare's milk. There
is neither good eating nor drinking in fresco. Who, even in these
civilised times, has never experienced this, when at some economic
table he has commenced dining after dusk, and waited for the
flavour till the lights came? The senses absolutely give and take
reciprocally. Can you tell pork from veal in the dark? or distinguish
Sherris from pure Malaga? Take away the candle from the smoking
man; by the glimmering of the left ashes, he knows that he is still
smoking, but he knows it only by an inference; till the restored
light, coming in aid of the olfactories, reveals to both senses the
full aroma. Then how he redoubles his puffs! how he burnishes!--There
is absolutely no such thing as reading, but by a candle. We have
tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry
arbours; but it was labour thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam
come about you, hovering and teazing, like so many coquets, that will
have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By
the midnight taper, the writer digests his meditations. By the same
light, we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame,
the odour. It is a mockery, all that is reported of the influential
Phoebus. No true poem ever owed its birth to the sun's light. They are
abstracted works--
"Things that were born, when none but the still night,
And his dumb candle, saw his pinching throes."
Marry, daylight--daylight might furnish the images, the crude
material; but for the fine shapings, the true turning and filing (as
mine author hath it), they must be content to hold their inspiration
of the candle. The mild internal light, that reveals them, like fires
on the domestic hearth, goes out in the sunshine. Night and silence
call out the starry fancies, Milton's Morning Hymn on Paradise, we
would hold a good wager, was penned at midnight; and Taylor's richer
description of a sun-rise smells decidedly of the taper. Even ourself,
in these our humbler lucubrations, tune our best measured cadences
(Prose has her cadences) not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier
watchman, "blessing the doors;" or the wild sweep of winds at
midnight. Even now a loftier speculation than we have yet attempted,
courts our endeavours. We would indite something about the Solar
System.--_Betty, bring the candles_.