LIGHT AND LIFE. 127 
ence light has on the system of the intellectual functions. 
The soul finds in it the least deceiving of the consolations 
it seeks for the eternal sadness of our destiny—the bitter 
melancholy of life. Thought, fettered and dumb in a dark 
place, springs into freedom and spirit at evening, in a room 
brilliant with light. We cannot shun the sad moods 
caused by gloomy and rainy weather, nor resist the impulse 
of joy given by the spectacle of a brilliant day. Here we 
must confess our slavery—yet a slavery to be welcomed, 
that yields only delights. And why should we not join in 
the chorus of all animate and inanimate things, which, at 
the touch of light, quiver, and thrill, and betray in a 
thousand languages the magical, rapturous stimulus of that 
contact ? By instinct, and spontaneously, we seek it 
everywhere, always happiest when it is found. In some 
sort, it suffices us. And what a part it plays, what a charm 
it gives, in works of poetry and art! 
This is not the place to unfold that attractive and 
hardly-opened chapter of sesthetics—to demonstrate the re- 
lation between the atmosphere and art, by interrogating 
the climates of the globe and the great masters of all ages, 
not following a system of empirical analogies and far- 
fetched suggestions, but led by strict physiology and rigid 
optic laws. A charming picture would unfold in tracing 
the countless and changeful aspects of the sky, and all the 
caprices of light and air in their influence over the moral 
and physical nature of painters, poets, and musicians. The 
ever-varying face of the sun, the fires of dawn and sunset, 
the opalescent play of air, the shimmer of twilight, the 
blue, green, shifting hues and iridescent gleams of sea or 
mountain—all these things find a destined answer in the 
inmost and unconscious ongrowings of life, as in the soul 
of one who looks understandingly at Nature’s works. In 
it they reveal and transform themselves by subtilest thrills, 
tender and creative. He who shall detect these—shali 
