Ah! this cold, cold light, how much of beauty and love it has congealed!  It has fallen like a mantle of snow over the warm, living life of the earth; and blooming flowers, that sent up odours on the soft air, have crumbled to dust, and bright summer waters that reflected the heavens in their blue depths, and glittered in the light of stars and moon and sun, have now been congealed into solid, dull opaque masses, which yield not to the tread of man.  Alas! no bird of beauty dips its wing in these dead waters, and plumes itself for an aerial flight of love and joy.  But the cold contraction chains down all the freer, beautiful life, into a hopeless, chilling inanity.

MIDNIGHT.—­The gloom has gathered into a darkness that may be felt; and seeing nothing, I would stretch forth my hands to feel if there is anything within my mind to stay my soul upon.  But, alas! in a deep sorrow, how little do mental acquisitions avail!  All the beautiful systems and theories that delighted my intelligence, and filled my thought in my noon of hope and life, have sunk into darkness.  How is this?  Sometimes I think that all light comes through the heart into the mind; and when love is quenched, behold, there is only darkness; the beauty and life and joy are gone.  Ah, woe is me!  Have I nothing left?—­no internal resources—­no wealth of knowledge, with which to minister to this poverty of hope and life?  It cannot be that all past efforts, all struggles and self-sacrifices, to attain this coveted and natural knowledge, were useless, vain mockeries.  I thought I should live by this knowledge; that when the outer life palled upon me, I could then retire within my own being to boundless stores of riches and beauty.  Well—­this time has come, and what do I find?  Truly it is no Aladdin-palace, glittering with gold and gems.  It is more like a cavernous depth, stored with rubbish, and from its dark deeps comes up an earthy odour, that almost suffocates my spirit.  But this is my all, and I must descend from the life of the heart to the life of the mind, and scan my unsatisfactory possessions.

Well, here is a world of childish, school-day lumber.  Once it was a great delight to me to learn that the world was round, and not square; but I cannot see that a knowledge of that fact affords me any great satisfaction now, for it has shaped itself to me as an acute angle.  And the earth’s surface! how I used to glow with the excitement of the bare thought of Rome! and Athens! and Constantinople! and their thrilling histories and wonders of art, and beauties of nature, seemed to me an indefinite world of unattainable delight and ecstasy.  But now, I have lived in all these places, and the light and glory have gone.  They have fallen within the freezing light of reason.  They are no longer like beautiful dreams to me.  They are squared down into fixed, unalterable facts.  I cannot gild them with any light of fancy; and I cannot extract from them anything like the delight of my childhood.  So I will turn from these fixed facts and look out for those philosophical theories, that gave me a later delight, as more interior mental pleasure.