these details, so completely
seen, are so spiritualized 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 from the polish of the furniture. This
warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the
moonbeams, 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 moonbeams 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.