tom our fellow, as knowing we shall soon be of their dark
companionship. Therefore, we cherish dreams. We try to spell in them
the alphabet of the invisible world; and think we know already, how it
shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes, which, while we clung to flesh
and blood, affrighted us, have become familiar. We feel attenuated
into their meagre essences, and have given the hand of half-way
approach to incorporeal being. We once thought life to be something;
but it has unaccountably fallen from us before its time. Therefore we
choose to dally with visions. The sun has no purposes of ours to light
us to. Why should we get up?

XV.--THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB

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