s 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 m