The Hour of Twilight




For the future we intend that at this hour the Mystic shall be at home,
less metaphysical and scientific than is his wont, but more really
himself. It is customary at this hour, before the lamps are brought in,
to give way a little and dream, letting all the tender fancies day
suppresses rise up in out minds. Wherever it is spent, whether in
the dusky room or walking home through the blue evening, all things
grow strangely softened and united; the magic of the old world
reappears. The commonplace streets take on something of the grandeur
and solemnity of starlit avenues of Egyptian temples the public
squares in the mingled glow and gloom grow beautiful as the Indian
grove where Sakuntala wandered with her maidens; the children chase
each other through the dusky shrubberies, as they flee past they
look at us with long remembered glances: lulled by the silence,
we forget a little while the hard edges of the material and remember
that we are spirits.

Now is the hour for memory, the time to call in and make more securely
our own all stray and beautiful ideas that visited us during the day,
and which might otherwise be forgotten. We should draw them in from
the region of things felt to the region of things understood; in
a focus burning with beauty and pure with truth we should bind them,
for from the thoughts thus gathered in something accrues to the
consciousness; on the morrow a change impalpable but real has taken
place in our being, we see beauty and truth through everything.