To us Northerners few expressions convey such a sense of peace and beauty as this of ‘in the gloaming.’ The twilight hour has had its singers and idealisers ever since poetry found a voice and made itself a power over men; and so long as human nature is as it is now—impressionable, yearning, influenced by the mystery of nature and the sacredness of beauty—so long will the tenderness of the gloaming find its answering echo in the soul, and the sweet influences of the hour be repeated in the depth of the emotions and the purity of the thoughts.

Between the light and the dark—or as we have it in our dear old local tongue, ‘’twixt the gloamin’ an’ the mirk’—what a world of precious memories and holy suggestions lies enshrined! The French entre chien et loup (between dog and wolf) is a poor equivalent for our ‘gloaming;’ and going farther south the thing is as absent as the expression. To be sure the sweet Ave Maria of the evening is to the pious Catholic all that the twilight is to us; when the church bells ring out the hour for prayer, and the sign that the day’s work is done, and the hurrying crowd stands for a moment hushed, with uplifted hands and reverent faces raised to heaven, each man bareheaded as he says his prayer, calling on Madonna to help him and his. But in the fervid countries which lie in the sunshine from winter to autumn and from dawn to dark, there is no gloaming as we have it. The sun goes down in a cloudless glory of burnished gold or blazing red, of sullen purple or of pearly opalescence; and then comes darkness swift and sudden as the overflowing of a tidal river; but of the soft gray luminous twilight—of that lingering after-glow of sky and air which we Northerners know and love—there is not a trace. Just as with the people themselves it is brilliant youth and glorious maturity, but for the most part an old age without dignity or charm. Nothing is so rare in southern climates as to see an old woman with that noble yet tender majesty, that gloaming of the mind and body, which makes so many among us as beautiful in their own way at seventy as they were at twenty. They fade as suddenly as their twilight; and the splendour of the day dies into the blackness of the night with scarce a trace of that calm, soft, peaceful period when it is still light enough for active life and loving duties, after the fervour of the noon has gone and before the dead dark has come.

The gloaming is the hour for some of the dearest circumstances of life; when heart grows nearer to heart, and there seems to be almost another sense granted for the perception of spiritual things. It is the hour when young lovers wander through the green lanes between the hawthorn and the clematis, while the nightingale sings in the high elm-tree, and the white moths flit by like winged ghosts or float like snow-flakes in the dusk. Or if it is in the winter-time, they sit in the bay of the window half hidden by the curtains, half revealed by the dying light, as is their own love. They have no need of speech. Nature and the gloaming are the voices between them which whisper in sigh and o’ercome all that the one longs to tell and the other yearns to hear; and the silence of their lips is the truest eloquence of their hearts. In the full blaze of daylight that silence would be oppressive or chilling. It would tell either too much or not enough; but in the twilight, when speech would be intrusive and commonplace, the mute influences of the hour are the best expressions of the soul. In meadow and wood and garden the scents of flowers and sprouting leaves, of moss and ferns and bark and bud, are more fragrant now than in the freshness of even the early dawn—that childhood of the day! They too come like the voices of Nature, telling softly secrets which the day cannot reveal. Everything is dreamy, indeterminate, and full of possibilities not yet realised. The moon is only a disc of unsubstantial vapour hanging softly in the sky, where the sunset tones still linger; the stars are faint uncertain points scarcely visible through the quivering chromatic haze; but gradually all this mystery will sharpen into the confessed beauty of the night, when the pale pure splendour of the moon, the glorious brightness of the stars, will take the place of the gloaming. As yet it is all softened colour and chastened tenderness; all silence yet eloquence; and the young lovers wandering by the scented hedgerows, or sitting in the bay of the window—they in the soft glow of the twilight, while the ruddy firelight floods the rest of the room—are in that perfect harmony with the circumstances round them of which the other name is happiness. Yes, the gloaming is the hour of love, as which of us does not know who has ever loved at all! Look back over the lapse of years, and see now what you saw then. You are walking on that broad path up the lone fell-side. The young bracken is sending out its rich scents, mixed with the odour of thyme and the sweetness of the golden gorse; the swallows are wheeling for their last rapid flights; the homing rooks are straggling wearily to the elms; the lark is singing faintly in his descent; and the honey-laden bees fly heavily to their hives. Do you not remember the thoughts, the emotions which made life for you at that moment a heavenly poem such as an angel might have written? Do you not remember the love which swelled your heart, and lifted it up from earth to the very footstool of God? Never can you forget the exquisite delight, the unfathomable revelations of that hour! It was in the gloaming when you told your love and knew that you were beloved, when the rack and the pain of doubt were finally set to rest, and the joy of certainty was established! That hour shaped your life for weal—alas! sometimes for woe to follow after! But in all the woe of the loss, you have the imperishable weal of the gain, and are richer by the love that you gave as well as by that which you received—by the memories that will never die, and the emotions which you can never forget!

The gloaming is the children’s hour, when mamma sings sweet songs, or plays for them brisk and lively music, to which they dance like shadowy sprites in and out from the dusk to the light. Or what is still dearer, she gathers them all close about her, the elder ones touching her knees, clinging to her shoulders, while the little one of all is in her arms half asleep in a cloud of fairy dreams of vague delight, as its curly head rests on her bosom, and the sweet soft voice lulls its senses into a state of enchantment, to which no opiate of after-time gives aught that is like. Then she tells them stirring tales of bold knights and lovely ladies, and how faith and courage conquered all the dangers that beset them, and brought them to good issues through evil paths. Or in a lower voice, she speaks to them of the great God in heaven, who through all His supreme might and majesty, can condescend even to the wants of a little child; and she tells them of the sinless angels; and of that dear Lord who came on the earth to save weak men from the consequences of their own wilful wickedness. She speaks to them of His purity, His love, His tenderness, and of the pattern left us in His life, by which we may all walk if we will. And to the end of their lives they remember those lessons of the quiet gloaming. One may go out into wild lands and live there with graceless men and Godless companions; but in the midst of all the evil which surrounds him, the mother’s words spoken when he was a little lad at her knee, come back like cool rains in the parching drought; and the crust of carelessness and something worse breaks from his soul as memory leads him back into what was the truest and holiest Church of his youth. Or the girl—she who now sits with her big blue eyes fixed on her mother, shining with pitying tears for the sorrows of the divine Son of Man, for the trials of suffering saint and heroic martyr—when she is thrown into the great world of fashion and dissipation to become a ‘leader of society,’ surrounded by temptations of all kinds—she too will remember this hour, and all that she learned and felt at her mother’s side. She will turn back to the holy lessons of piety and humility, of modesty and honour, taught her then by one who fulfilled those lessons in her own life; and she will be strengthened to meet her dangers from the memory of those pure defences. The mother’s influence never wholly dies; and never is that influence more powerfully exerted, its traces more deeply engraved than in the gloaming, when the sweet, sad Bible stories are told in a low and loving voice, till the whole heart is stirred, and the deepest recesses of spiritual consciousness are reached.

The gloaming is the hour of the highest thoughts of which we may be capable; the hour when the poet sings his song in his own heart before he has written down the words on paper; when the painter sees his picture completed by the divine artistry of the imagination before he has set his palette or sketched in the outline; when the unformed and chaotic thought long floating in the brain, clears itself from the mists and takes definite shape, soon to become embodied in creation. The youth dreams of that splendid achievement which is to win the great game of fortune; he sees himself going up for his degree in advance of the rest, cheered by his companions, congratulated by the ‘dons’ as he comes out Double-first, or the Senior Wrangler of his year. Or he is pleading before the judge at a very early stage in his legal career, and winning the most important cause of the term—winning it by sheer hard work and strength of brain—with ‘silk’ and perhaps the woolsack to follow. Or he is in the House arguing for humanity against statecraft, for justice against oppression, for truth against falsehood, and carrying the majority with him—making men’s hearts to burn within them by reason of his eloquence, his daring, and the intrinsic justice of his cause, for the first time indubitably proved by him. Or he has written his book, and wakes to find himself famous, the world lifting its cap to him in recognition of his success, and the critics united in praise, with not a surly note of blame in all the pack. Or he has painted his heroic picture—his art of the highest, his theme the most heroic—and the Royal Academy opens its doors with a clang to let him through. Or he has built his cathedral, and is not ashamed to look up at the lines of the old Abbey. Or he has invented his new engine, discovered his new planet, demonstrated the hidden law which so many suspect and no one has proved. It is the hour for all these grand dreams of ambition, all these fairy tales of hope; and if impossible at times to realise, yet they are good for the young mind to entertain; as it is good for the young athlete to try his strength against superior forces, and for the young bowman to aim higher than he can strike.

It is the hour when greatness, yet inchoate and undeveloped, grows within its husk—the seed-time of future excellence through the fermentation of thought. There must be intervals of preparation, and this is one of them. The quiet spell of the gloaming, when the fairest visions are seen, the boldest wishes framed, the loftiest points reached—how useful it is if taken as the spring-board for the true leap—harmful enough if accepted as sufficient in itself; as if the hope, the wish, the incoherent intention were enough, and realisation always put off till the morrow, did not count. For there is ever the danger that day-dreaming should become a habit, and that a man should be contented with fashioning a thought in his brain without caring to embody it in deed. But there is always danger of misuse in all things; and the fear of falling is no bad help towards keeping one’s footing firm when the path is slippery and the way-marks treacherous.

The gloaming is the hour for quiet retrospection of the hours that are past, for fearless onlooking to those which are to come, and for closer communing with God and one’s own soul. The day is flowing into the night through the golden gate of the twilight, just as fervid youth and fragrant womanhood, the strength of manhood and the leader’s power, are passing through the calm rest of old age into the stillness of death. In the gloaming, the soul seems to see the right value and the true shapes of things more clearly than it did when the sun was high, and the eyes were dazzled with its shine and the blood fevered with its heat. Then passion was strong, and with passion, self-will, false aims, false beliefs—and disappointment as the shadow lying behind. If the power was there to create, to resist, to combat, to subdue, so also was the bitter smart and the cruel blow. And there was the inevitable deception of the senses. Then the sunlight fell on the stagnant waters of the deadly swamp and turned them into lakes of purest gold, which a wise man would spend his time well to seek and his strength to possess. Now in the twilight the false shine has faded from the low-lying pools, and the dank and deadly mists creep up to mark both their place and quality. If only he had known the truth of things in time! If only he had not believed that marsh-lands were living lakes of golden waters, which a man would do well to give his life to gain!

In the daytime, clouds obscured the sun, so that the impatient and sore-hearted said in his bitterness that the god had turned his face from the earth and from him, and that to-morrow’s glory would never rise. Now in the gloaming the hope of that morrow has already lessened in anticipation the evil done by the clouds of to-day, and trust and hope come in the place of sorrow and despair. The worst has been—make room now for the better. No more false seeming and no more blinding by the deceived and flattered senses; no more mis-diversion of energy, and taking for pure and beautiful waters of life deadly morass and stagnant marsh. The gloaming of life sets a man straight not only with himself but with things, and gives him a truer knowledge than he ever had before. He stands full face to the west and looks into the light, which now he can bear, and which he no longer finds bewildering or blinding. That time of tumult and passion, of heat and strife, through which he has passed, how glad he is to leave it all behind him while waiting, watching for the quiet peace of the night through the tender softness of the gloaming! How near and yet how far off seem to him the unfulfilled hopes of the morning, the mistaken endeavour of the noon, the hard labour and fierce struggle of the day! If he had only known in time the things which were best for him, how differently he would have acted—and now: God’s will be done, and God pardon all his sins! He must take things as they stand, trusting in the unfailing mercy; for if repentance is good, regret is vain, and the gloaming is for peace, not strife.

Slowly the last rays of the sun fade out of the sky, and the lingering light as slowly follows. The world lies hushed as a tired sleeper, and the moon and the stars come out as watchers—as signs too of other worlds and other lives. But the old man sitting pale and peaceful in the house-porch knows now what he no longer sees; for the gloaming of his life has passed into the deep stillness of something beyond, as the day has flowed into the night, and both lie in the hollow of God’s right hand.