Everything seemed possessed, reeling with excitement, and with a grave disturbance of spirit, before the might of this hetero-sexual instinct, which drives male upon female, revives the splendour of birds' plumage, sharpens the note of frogs, distils the scents of flowers, causes the shallow stream to laugh aloud, makes the meadow-grasses to dance, and the tigers to roar with excess of life: which is able also to twine serpents in a slimy embrace, and to whirl the deadly scorpions in a loathsome ecstasy. It seems so universal, this omnipotent force, able to run down the moonbeams, to flutter in the wind, to wave with the grasses, to thrill through all the atmosphere. It makes human beings cling together in quivering couples, jerking to the pull of its nameless demand: and truly seems one spirit in these many shapes, an imperious will which in all these varied pairings is shadowing out the frame of the master-law of reproduction. Even the elements appear subject to its sway: for this passion which binds one to another of a kind that every sort may see something of universality in its single mood, may it not be this which puts the little more of glory in the sunlight, that extra softness in the air of night, that repose in open space, that richer music in the waves, that purer purity in heaven, and on earth that sustained thrill? From head to foot the giant tree responded to the new warmth of sentiment in nature. While the sun shone the birds had mated in its boughs. Now, in the moonshine, the insects had their turn, and clung together silently in the vague shimmering mist of their brilliant colours. Deep in the soil the tap-roots of plants swelled up in pleasure: in the air floated a sea of all imaginable scents, impalpable unseen messengers through space of the universal fluid which betrays itself to our sense of smell on the one side, and on another side in the strange lights of lovers' eyes. If we remember how the loved one would tell us her feelings and her inmost thoughts by a mere glance, then it will not seem to us far-fetched that plants hold converse in the perfumes which they scatter in the air. These invisible and intangible but powerful scents, which spread abroad to invite insects and to stupefy us with nebulous desires, seem to play much the same role as the magnetism of our looks, that other strange power which is able by shuffling the blues and blacks and greens of our eyes to express love or indifference or hate; and without any change of shape or colour can reassure with gentleness or paralyse with terror, conveying the most subtle shades of desire and passion and command. CHAPTER 8 _What the Moon Saw_