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 farther
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.
    It is my belief, however, that, had I attempted a different order of
composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointless and
inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myself with writing out the
narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the Inspectors, whom I should be most
ungrateful not to mention; since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me
to laughter and admiration by his marvellous gifts as a story-teller. Could I
have preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humorous coloring
which nature taught him how to throw over his descriptions, the result, I
honestly believe, would have been something new in literature. Or I might
readily have found a more serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of
this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back
into another age; or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy
matter, when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was
broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would
have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of
to-day, and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualize the burden
that began to weigh so heavily;