Is not the tone of thought here expressed one natural to us all at certain times, when for us life’s vivid lights and deep shadows have all toned into a uniform half tint? We all have such twilight hours: times when the sun has sunk, and our heart has gone down with it, and a grey depression settles gradually upon the soul. Times when we feel that our life is little, and low, and mean: when we yearn for a sympathy that earth has not to give; when we turn away disheartened and disgusted from our life and from ourselves, and turn the faces of what seemed our most faultless works to the wall, and care not if we never saw them again. Times when we go about to cause our heart to despair of all the labour which we took under the sun. Times when the failures of others seem better than our successes; times when we lament over the lowness of our aim, the meanness of our intention, the winglessness of our soul; and yet times when our very discontent with all that we are and have accomplished, our very disgust at our grovelling minds, prove our affinity with higher things than any of these that we have grasped here. Those anguished yearnings to be nobler prove that we are something nobler than we hold ourselves to be. The depression of the twilight marks our kindred with the golden glory of the sun. Thus may we cheer our hearts, that in their dull hours are wont to judge our aims by our attainments, and from the inadequacy of the performance, to conclude the lowness of the intention. The workman’s dissatisfaction with his own life’s work is the clear proof that his inmost self is nobler, not only than his attainments, but often even than his endeavours. I awake from my abstraction, however, and look around. The twilight has deepened, the flowers are losing their colour, the surrounding objects their distinctness. One peculiar property, sometimes a charm, sometimes a dread, of this light neither clear nor dark, begins to be developed. I mean the uncertainty, the indefiniteness, the illusions of twilight. And how many analogies occur to my mind as I sit here musing on the twilight, and comparing with it the indistinctness and the ænigma in which we are living here.