What  repartees  could  have  passed,  when  you  must
have  felt  about  for  a  smile,  and  handled  a  neighbor'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  unlanterned  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  dipped  his  scooped  palm
in  a  kid-skin  of  wild  honey,  when  he  meditated  right
mare's  milk.  There  is  neither  ffood  eatino;  nor  drink-
ing  in  fresco.  Who,  even  in  these  civilized  times,  has
never  experienced  this,  when  at  some  economic  table
he  has  commenced  dining  after  dusk,  and  waited  for
the  flavor  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  ftill
aroma.  Then  how  he  redoubles  his  puffs  !  how  he
burnishes !  —  There    is    absolutely   no    such    thing   as


POPULAR   FALLACIES.  457

reading  but  by  a  candle.  We  have  tried  the  affecta-
tion of  a  book  at  noonday  in  gardens,  and  in  sultiy
arbors  ;  but  it  was  labor  thrown  away.  Those  gay
motes  in  the  beam  come  about  you,  hovering  and  teas-
ing, like  so  many  coquettes,  that  will  have  you  all  to
their  self,  and  are  jealous  of  your  abstractions.  By  the
midnight  taper,  the  writer  digests  his  meditations.  B}-
the  same  light  we  must  approach  to  their  perusal,  if  we
would  catch  the  flame,  the  odor.  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.
