Books and Night-Lights

The rain flashed across the midnight window with a myriad feet. There
was a groan in outer darkness, the voice of all nameless dreads. The
nervous candle-flame shuddered by my bedside. The groaning rose to a
shriek, and the little flame jumped in a panic, and nearly left its
white column. Out of the corners of the room swarmed the released
shadows. Black spectres danced in ecstasy over my bed. I love fresh
air, but I cannot allow it to slay the shining and delicate body of my
little friend the candle-flame, the comrade who ventures with me into
the solitudes beyond midnight. I shut the window.

They talk of the candle-power of an electric bulb. What do they mean?
It cannot have the faintest glimmer of the real power of my candle. It
would be as right to express, in the same inverted and foolish
comparison, the worth of "those delicate sisters, the Pleiades." That
pinch of star dust, the Pleiades, exquisitely remote in deepest night,
in the profound where light all but fails, has not the power of a
sulphur match; yet, still apprehensive to the mind though tremulous on
the limit of vision, and sometimes even vanishing, it brings into
distinction those distant and difficult hints--hidden far behind all
our verified thoughts--which we rarely properly view. I should like to
know of any great arc-lamp which could do that. So the star-like candle
for me. No other light follows so intimately an author's most ghostly
suggestion. We sit, the candle and I, in the midst of the shades we are
conquering, and sometimes look up from the lucent page to contemplate
the dark hosts of the enemy with a smile before they overwhelm us; as
they will, of course. Like me, the candle is mortal; it will burn out.

* * * * *

As the bed-book itself should be a sort of night-light, to assist its
illumination, coarse lamps are useless. They would douse the book. The
light for such a book must accord with it. It must be, like the book, a
limited, personal, mellow, and companionable glow; the solitary taper
beside the only worshipper in a sanctuary. That is why nothing can
compare with the intimacy of candle-light for a bed-book. It is a
living heart, bright and warm in central night, burning for us alone,
holding the gaunt and towering shadows at bay. There the monstrous
spectres stand in our midnight room, the advance guard of the darkness
of the world, held off by our valiant litt