Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 741, March 9, 1878

No. 741.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, MARCH 9, 1878.
To us Northerners few expressions convey such a sense of peace and beauty as this of ‘in the gloaming.’ The twilight hour has had its singers and idealisers ever since poetry found a voice and made itself a power over men; and so long as human nature is as it is now—impressionable, yearning, influenced by the mystery of nature and the sacredness of beauty—so long will the tenderness of the gloaming find its answering echo in the soul, and the sweet influences of the hour be repeated in the depth of the emotions and the purity of the thoughts.
Between the light and the dark—or as we have it in our dear old local tongue, ‘’twixt the gloamin’ an’ the mirk’—what a world of precious memories and holy suggestions lies enshrined! The French entre chien et loup (between dog and wolf) is a poor equivalent for our ‘gloaming;’ and going farther south the thing is as absent as the expression. To be sure the sweet Ave Maria of the evening is to the pious Catholic all that the twilight is to us; when the church bells ring out the hour for prayer, and the sign that the day’s work is done, and the hurrying crowd stands for a moment hushed, with uplifted hands and reverent faces raised to heaven, each man bareheaded as he says his prayer, calling on Madonna to help him and his. But in the fervid countries which lie in the sunshine from winter to autumn and from dawn to dark, there is no gloaming as we have it. The sun goes down in a cloudless glory of burnished gold or blazing red, of sullen purple or of pearly opalescence; and then comes darkness swift and sudden as the overflowing of a tidal river; but of the soft gray luminous twilight—of that lingering after-glow of sky and air which we Northerners know and love—there is not a trace. Just as with the people themselves it is brilliant youth and glorious maturity, but for the most part an old age without dignity or charm. Nothing is so rare in southern climates as to see an old woman with that noble yet tender majesty, that gloaming of the mind and body, which makes so many among us as beautiful in their own way at seventy as they were at twenty. They fade as suddenly as their twilight; and the splendour of the day dies into the blackness of the night with scarce a trace of that calm, soft, peaceful period when it is still light enough for active life and loving duties, after the fervour of the noon has gone and before the dead dark has come.