is the tender, troubled light in the eyes of dogs.
There is a deposit, an infinitesimal deposit, it may be, of the radium of romance in the slag of all souls. Call it by other names—optimism, idealism, religion—you still leave it undefined; an inherent, essential element, harder to separate from the spiritual dross of us than radium from its carnotite; a kind of atomic property of the spirit which breaks up its substance; which ionizes, energizes, and illumines it.
There may be souls that never knew its power, but I can hardly think there ever was a soul shut in a cave so darksome, that romance never entered with its touch of radiance, if only as
“A little glooming light, much like a shade.”
This is the light in the eyes of dogs, the light that birds and bees follow, and the jellyfish steering round and round his course. Something like its quivering flame burns down in the green, dismal depths of the sea; down in the black subliminal depths; and on down in the heart of the world. For what other light is it, that guides the herring every spring, in from the ocean up Weymouth Back River? or the salmon in from the Pacific, up, high up the Columbia to the Snake, and higher up the Snake into the deep, dark gorges of the Imnaha?
It is now long past October, and where is the bluebird’s mate of June? She has forgotten him, and is forgotten by him, but he has not forgotten his dream-of-her; for I saw him in the orchard, while southward bound, going in and out of the apple-tree holes, the lover still, the dream-of-her in his heart, holding over from the summer and coming to meet him ahead of her, down the winter, out of the coming spring.
The dog and you and I and even the humble toad are dreamers at heart, all of us, only we are deeper adream than they.
“If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die you are the same,”
says Freneau to a flower. Yet the flowers are of the dust that I am made of, and they too are the stuff of dreams. And the toad under the kitchen-steps, what he knows of my heart! As if the unrequited pain of lovers, the sweetest, saddest things of poets, had always been his portion, and their vague melancholy the only measure of his tremulous twilight song. When the soft spring dusk has stolen into the young eyes of the day, as the first shadow of some sweet fear into the startled eyes of a girl, then out of the hush, quavering through the tender gloom,