CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.
CONTENTS
IN THE GLOAMING.
HELENA, LADY HARROGATE.
SENSATIONAL REPORTING.
THE BONE-CAVE INSCRIPTION.
THE ‘HEARTS OF OAK’ SOCIETY.
THE DALESFOLK.
A SPRING MORNING.
No. 741.
Price 1½d.
SATURDAY, MARCH 9, 1878.
IN THE GLOAMING.
To us Northerners few expressions convey such asense of peace and beauty as this of ‘in the gloaming.’The twilight hour has had its singers andidealisers ever since poetry found a voice andmade itself a power over men; and so long ashuman nature is as it is now—impressionable,yearning, influenced by the mystery of nature andthe sacredness of beauty—so long will the tendernessof the gloaming find its answering echo in thesoul, and the sweet influences of the hour berepeated in the depth of the emotions and thepurity of the thoughts.
Between the light and the dark—or as we haveit in our dear old local tongue, ‘’twixt the gloamin’an’ the mirk’—what a world of precious memoriesand holy suggestions lies enshrined! The Frenchentre chien et loup (between dog and wolf) is apoor equivalent for our ‘gloaming;’ and goingfarther south the thing is as absent as theexpression. To be sure the sweet Ave Mariaof the evening is to the pious Catholic all thatthe twilight is to us; when the church bells ringout the hour for prayer, and the sign that theday’s work is done, and the hurrying crowd standsfor a moment hushed, with uplifted hands andreverent faces raised to heaven, each man bareheadedas he says his prayer, calling on Madonnato help him and his. But in the fervid countrieswhich lie in the sunshine from winter to autumnand from dawn to dark, there is no gloaming aswe have it. The sun goes down in a cloudlessglory of burnished gold or blazing red, of sullenpurple or of pearly opalescence; and then comesdarkness swift and sudden as the overflowing ofa tidal river; but of the soft gray luminous twilight—ofthat lingering after-glow of sky and airwhich we Northerners know and love—there is nota trace. Just as with the people themselves it isbrilliant youth and glorious maturity, but for themost part an old age without dignity or charm.Nothing is so rare in southern climates as to seean old woman with that noble yet tender majesty,that gloaming of the mind and body, which makesso many among us as beautiful in their own wayat seventy as they were at twenty. They fadeas suddenly as their twilight; and the splendourof the day dies into the blackness of the nightwith scarce a trace of that calm, soft, peacefulperiod when it is still light enough for active lifeand loving duties, after the fervour