for
whom there were no 'cheerful lights of home;' to expatiate on the
loveliness of the moon to him who must spend the chill night with no
other covering than her 'silver mantle.'... Moonlight and memory are
associated together in my mind--reflections of a set sun, wrapping in
their calm, beautiful light, all things, even the graves of those we
love.... I have thought that the murmur of the brook was the _voice of
Silence_. Moonlight expresses to the eye--_silence_.... 'All this
unreal?' I beg your pardon; I claim for my feelings the same reality
that you claim for yours. Is only what is gross real? Is not the sky as
real as the mountain that pierces it? Is there more reality in the chink
of the dollar than in 'the music of the spheres'? This first is, I
acknowledge, to me a pleasant sound, though only 'heard at rarest
intervals.'... Yet I am rather inclined to believe in the reality of
the music of the spheres; it is too ethereal, too spiritual a music for
the ear to _sense_ it; the food and drink of the gods, ambrosia and
nectar, even were we to swallow them, could our mortal palates taste
them? Even thus may we drink in the music of the spheres, and, strange
as it may seem, the more _ear_ we have, the less likely we will be to
hear it.

But--_not_ 'in this connection,' in no connection--the utilitarian also
thoroughly despises cobweb theories, as he terms them. The world owes
its greatest achievements to theories--cobwebs they may be. In caves
have been found books of stone, whose nucleus was but cobweb; along
these webs the calcareous solution ran, and hardened into stone. A
cobweb theory has been the thread, on which, drop by drop, as it were,
experiments have run and hardened into a possibility on which might be
hung a _steam-boat_.

There goes the night-train. Every morning as the engine with its train
passes, the dark smoke rushing out of the chimney is touched by the rays
of the rising sun and made glorious. I doubt not my enjoyment in looking
at it is as real as that of the heaviest stockholder. Here I 'pitch my
foot against'--as Paley says in his famous watch-argument--_a
quotation_.

'Life is transfigured in the soft and tender
Light of love, as a volume dense
Of rolling smoke becomes a wreathed splendor
In the setting sun.'

But this warm subject of love I avoid as the whale avoids the warm water
of the Gulf Stream. So I will wheel about--first, one more digression:
This love, like the Gulf