a language, and which, in fact, is a language.  It is the effort which the world makes to speak.  It is the lisping of the wonderful.  In this wail is manifested vaguely all that the vast dark palpitation endures, suffers, accepts, rejects.  For the most part it talks nonsense; it is like an access of chronic sickness, and rather an epilepsy diffused than a force employed; we fancy that we are witnessing the descent of supreme evil into the infinite.  At moments we seem to discern a reclamation of the elements, some vain effort of chaos to reassert itself over creation.  At times it is a complaint.  The void bewails and justifies itself.  It is as the pleading of the world’s cause.  We can fancy that the universe is engaged in a lawsuit; we listen—­we try to grasp the reasons given, the redoubtable for and against.  Such a moaning of the shadows has the tenacity of a syllogism.  Here is a vast trouble for thought.  Here is the raison d’etre of mythologies and polytheisms.  To the terror of those great murmurs are added superhuman outlines melting away as they appear—­Eumenides which are almost distinct, throats of Furies shaped in the clouds, Plutonian chimeras almost defined.  No horrors equal those sobs, those laughs, those tricks of tumult, those inscrutable questions and answers, those appeals to unknown aid.  Man knows not what to become in the presence of that awful incantation.  He bows under the enigma of those Draconian intonations.  What latent meaning have they?  What do they signify?  What do they threaten?  What do they implore?  It would seem as though all bonds were loosened.  Vociferations from precipice to precipice, from air to water, from the wind to the wave, from the rain to the rock, from the zenith to the nadir, from the stars to the foam—­the abyss unmuzzled—­such is that tumult, complicated by some mysterious strife with evil consciences.

The loquacity of night is not less lugubrious than its silence.  One feels in it the anger of the unknown.

Night is a presence.  Presence of what?

For that matter we must distinguish between night and the shadows.  In the night there is the absolute; in the darkness the multiple.  Grammar, logic as it is, admits of no singular for the shadows.  The night is one, the shadows are many.[5]

This mist of nocturnal mystery is the scattered, the fugitive, the crumbling, the fatal; one feels earth no longer, one feels the other reality.

In the shadow, infinite and indefinite, lives something or some one; but that which lives there forms part of our death.  After our earthly passage, when that shadow shall be light for us, the life which is beyond our life shall seize us.  Meanwhile it appears to touch and try us.  Obscurity is a pressure.  Night is, as it were, a hand placed on our soul.  At certain hideous and solemn hours we feel that which is beyond the wall of the tomb encroaching on us.

Never does this proximity of the unknown seem more imminent than in storms at sea.  The horrible combines with the fantastic.  The possible interrupter of human actions, the old Cloud compeller, has it in his power to mould, in whatsoever shape he chooses, the inconsistent element, the limitless incoherence, the force diffused and undecided of aim.  That mystery the tempest every instant accepts and executes some unknown changes of will, apparent or real.