Diogenes of London (collection)/Over the Fire

O them that have no fears of the narrow house, winter is a time of keener pleasures than any of the three remaining seasons. I think, indeed, it is pretty amply redeemed by its own idiosyncrasies. Its very vices provoke their own defeat, and call forth conditions which lay them into insignificance. Of its ill purpose there can be no doubt; its slow and shuffling gait, its noxious breath, its little sneaking round of spites, smack all of malignity. You can see its withered arms itching for action from the back of September where it jostles with the melancholy autumn. It is thanks to no mercy of the season, but to your own fortitude alone, that you can clear the corner and come safely into spring. But we are happily armed with some compensation for those treacheries, and so live through the winter pretty securely in our trenches. The evil humours of this Septentrion prey upon the weaker bodies; for the more part, though we keep at odds, we exact therefrom many definite pleasures and one particular ecstasy. Each season has its individual habits, proper to the respective rigours, and by these our human kind maintains itself in harmony with its circumstances, and derives from these its separate delights. But this particular ecstasy of which I speak is a character of the fourth alone. It will sound odd, perhaps paradoxical and flush of sentiment; it is irrational, I know; it is certainly a most immaterial enjoyment; and yet in one mood not uncommon to a man of cares, there is a finer zest in dreaming at the fire than may be got from any employment or recreation from term to term of the rolling year.

It is this touch of superterrene fancy that makes winter the most romantical of seasons. There is something unessential to earth in a fireside reverie, whence or how deriving I know not. You will have, of course, the gross comfort of creature warmth in cover from a snowing or a streaming sky; but this is intelligible and human, very welcome and soothing against the outrageous elements. It is in the mind you will feel the subtilest delight. Your hands rubbing at your knees, your body relaxing in a gentle glow, your eyes set with some gratitude upon the occasion of your comfort, you will drift and pass into another world: a world of the rarest illusions, a world of exquisite and intangible thoughts and fancies. To say you are building castles in the embers is to interpret your dreams heinously: you will never see in the fire one single vision that ministers to your vulgar ambitions or aspirations. Wealth and prosperity, long life and happiness—these have no place in the suggestions of the fire; nor, indeed, has any passion common to the streets. The sights and visions are too delicate, too fleeting for utterance, even for distinct comprehension. The flames transfigure all. When you enter therein you leave the world of coherence and form behind you, and live only with impalpable presences and undefined desires. There are castles and palaces, it is true, glimmering through diaphanous veils of mist; there are caverns beyond caverns of mystical light reaching from space to space till they vanish in the glowing recesses. But these fabrics are unsubstantial and recall no memory of the earth, being of faery, and released from all mundane laws and conditions. What reason can there be for this strange transition? In the red heart of the fire alone does sorcery linger; and here alone it is possible to be made free of exigent time, and to turn Space into Infinity. All that is illimitable and eternal pervades the thoughts that rise with the flames. The mind assumes the quality of a mirror, and reflects each momentary change of the ashes with sensitive precision. In a minute you will have suffered as many sensations as in other times would crowd a life. There is no stability nor rest in the ethereal construction of the embers, and your mind, too, wanders on wings. The stream of fancies sweeps in a luminous pageant over you: the breath comes and goes, and with each inspiration a hundred formless imaginings have fled. You can behold wonders in the fire. You may see the universe in ruins, and your life reverted and resolved; spirits may appear to you in the flickering tongues; you may be rapt up to catch a glimpse of Deity itself. And whatever marvels pass before you, these fantasies—so swift, so instant, as to slip the nimblest mind—leave by their passage a sweet and thrilling contentment, a self-sufficient ecstasy. You will perceive that you are communing with a higher sphere, are admitted to a transcendent company. At times some faint memory seems to mingle with your sensations, as though they were the issue of your own past: a recollection descends with a thrill upon you; flashes and is gone. The gates of your soul swing open for an instant; but ere your eye can spy with certainty upon the inner sanctuary it has clapped to again, and you are left to wonder on your own secrets. How much is there in the spirit of man without his knowledge? Is it that in these moments he makes a vague contact with a superior consciousness, in fits, in gushes, in irregular spasms? There is, at least, no wit sufficient to track to its fount this intermittent flow of royal condescension. As an arrow in the air, as a swallow through the sky, so thought upon thought takes flight out of the void into the void, leaving vacancy behind. The motes of fancy glitter in the mind, impalpable, luminous, and innumerable. They impress the soul with a certain mark, and sail forthwith out of vision. Your hold upon your own mind is at this time very insecure, and you flutter with the flames in and out of sanity. For to feel and to be unable to refer your feeling to its components is to verge on madness. Now you will have a floating sensibility of something dear and familiar; remembrance comes at a call to your elbow; and then the flash has gone, and the unknown, the unknowable, the ineffable, that which lies beyond sense of touch or sight or audience, gleams, an instantaneous spark, in the shadows of your soul.

And thus the phantasmagoria passes, until the white embers fall and fade and turn suddenly to red; and the red pales behind its feathered coat of ashes, leaving you confronted and encompassed by the monstrous verities of this boreal and laborious life. Gone are your serene and mystical dreams, and there lie the ashes—grey, elemental, most comprehensible, rudely tangible, dust and rubbish for the broom.