The sweet fern and indigo in
overgrown wood-paths wet you with dew up to your middle. The leaves of the
shrub-oak are shining as if a liquid were flowing over them. The pools
seen through the trees are as full of light as the sky. "The light of the
day takes refuge in their bosoms," as the Purana says of the ocean. All
white objects are more remarkable than by day. A distant cliff looks like
a phosphorescent space on a hillside. The woods are heavy and dark. Nature
slumbers. You see the moonlight reflected from particular stumps in the
recesses of the forest, as if she selected what to shine on. These small
fractions of her light remind one of the plant called moon-seed,--as if
the moon were sowing it in such places.
In the night the eyes are partly closed or retire into the head. Other
senses take the lead. The walker is guided as well by the sense of smell.
Every plant and field and forest emits its odor now, swamp-pink in the
meadow and tansy in the road; and there is the peculiar dry scent of corn
which has begun to show its tassels. The senses both of hearing and
smelling are more alert. We hear the tinkling of rills which we never
detected before. From time to time, high up on the sides of hills, you
pass through a stratum of warm air. A blast which has come up from the
sultry plains of noon. It tells of the day, of sunny noon-tide hours and
banks, of the laborer wiping his brow and the bee humming amid flowers. It
is an air in which work has been done,--which men have breathed. It
circulates about from wood-side to hill-side like a dog that has lost its
master, now that the sun is gone. The rocks retain all night the warmth of
the sun which they have absorbed. And so does the sand. If you dig a few
inches into it you find a warm bed. You lie on your back on a rock in a
pasture on the top of some bare hill at midnight, and speculate on the
height of the starry canopy. The stars are the jewels of the night, and
perchance surpass anything which day has to show. A companion with whom I
was sailing one very windy but bright moonlight night, when the stars were
few and faint, thought that a man could get along with _them_,--though he
was considerably reduced in his circumstances,--that they were a kind of
bread and cheese that never failed.
No wonder that there have been astrologers, that some have conceived that
they were personally related to particular stars. Dubartas, as translated
by Sylvester, says he'll
"not believe that the great architect
With all these fires the heavenly arches decked
Only for show, and with these glistering shields,
T' awake poor shepherds, watching in the fields."
He'll "not believe that the least flower which pranks
Our garden borders, or our common banks,
And the least stone, that in her warming lap
Our mother earth doth covetously wrap,
Hath some peculiar virtue of its own,
And that the glorious stars of heav'n have none."
And Sir Walter Raleigh well says, "the stars are instruments of far
greater use, than to give an obscure light, and for men to gaze on after
sunset;" and he quotes Plotinus as affirming that they "are significant,
but not efficient;" and also Augustine as saying, "_Deus regit inferiora
corpora per superiora_:" God rules the bodies below by those above.
