If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it
might well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar
room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its
figures so distinctly--making every object so minutely visible,
yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility--is a medium the
most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his
illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the
well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate
individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a
volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the
book-case; the picture on the wall--all these details, so
completely seen, are so spiritualised by the unusual light, that
they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of
intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this
change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child's shoe; the doll,
seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse--whatever,
in a word, has been used or played with during the day is now
invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though
still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore,
the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory,
somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the
Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with
the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here without
affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene
to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a
form, beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak
of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt
whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred
from our fireside.
The somewhat dim coal fire has an essential Influence in
producing the effect which I would describe. It throws its
unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness
upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam upon the
polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with
the cold spirituality of the moon-beams, and communicates, as it
were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms
which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images into
men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold--deep
within its haunted verge--the smouldering glow of the
half-extinguished anthracite, the white moon-beams on the floor,
and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture,
with one remove further from the actual, and nearer to the
imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before
him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things,
and make them look like truth, he need never try to write
romances.
But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience,
moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of firelight, were just
alike in my regard; and neither of them was of one whit more
avail than the twinkle of a tallow-candle. An entire class of
susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them--of no great
richness or value, but the best I had--was gone from me.