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 upon the
polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with
the cold spirituality of the moon-beams, 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 moon-beams 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.
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