For two hours the carriages had been steadily streaming under the archway, and pouring their fair occupants, gauzy as summer, into the blazing saloons.  The flashing candelabra drew the poor little moths from the outermost corners into the central vortex of light.  Dazzled by the hot radiance, they strove to retreat again into the cool conservatories and side-rooms; but at that moment threads of music that had been carelessly winding through the crowd were caught up by an unseen hand and knotted,—­and behold! already the moths found themselves imprisoned in a strong net-work of sound, whose intricate meshes entangled the rooms and the company, and the very light itself.  The light, however, was too subtile for long confinement; it slipped along the melodious mazes, and melted into the rich odor that exhaled from the roses and jessamines in the conservatory.  The light was a welcome visitor to the hyacinths and roses, obliged to hide in torturing silence in the still green-house, pouring out their passionate dumb life in intensity of fragrance.  A life just hovering on the borders of the world, and yet forbidden to enter!  But, bathed in the glowing effulgence of the light, this invisible fragrance could be born, and enter the visible world as color.  For the fragrance is the unborn soul of the flower; color, that soul arrested in its restless wanderings,—­embodied fragrance.  Then the colors upon the purple hyacinths and white jessamines, and the flashing gems that rested on white bosoms like glittering drops of ice upon a snow-wreath, and the sheen of rustling silks, and the gilded picture-frames, and the florid carpets, and the twinkling feet on the carpets’ roses, and the flushing of roses in the dancers’ cheeks, and the radiant heads of the white-robed girls, ran into one another, blending into an intensity of color that dimmed itself.  And the music still kept spinning and spinning, and finally wove in the color and fragrance and light with its subtile self; and the background of the woof was the hum and murmur of voices, and the continual rustling of feet.  No wonder the poor moths were ensnared in such bewilderment!

Do you pity the captives?  But it is a delicious imprisonment, and its fullest delights cannot be realized except by prisoners.  In the vast halls of Intellect and Reason one may indeed be master, marching (a little chilled perhaps) with firm step and head erect.  But on these enchanted grounds there is no medium between a wretched clearness of insight that reduces every curve to a number of straight lines, all clouds to precipitated vapor, all rainbows to an oblique coincidence between a sunbeam and a drop of water, and a total surrender of self to the influences of the flitting moment.

Away with these fellows, who would force their miserable microscopes before the eyes of these happy gauzy moths!—­to-night is only the time for spinning cobwebs.  Hold your breath, philosopher, lest you sweep them away too rudely!  Alas for the airy cobwebs!  In that cool anteroom is a philosopher’s broom, hard at work, brushing them remorselessly into a perplexing dilemma,—­the frightful increase of the human race.