But
best of all is this which another writer has expressed: "_Sapiens
adjuvabit opus astrorum quemadmodum agricola terrae naturam_:" a wise man
assisteth the work of the stars as the husbandman helpeth the nature of
the soil.
It does not concern men who are asleep in their beds, but it is very
important to the traveller, whether the moon shines brightly or is
obscured. It is not easy to realize the serene joy of all the earth, when
she commences to shine unobstructedly, unless you have often been abroad
alone in moonlight nights. She seems to be waging continual war with the
clouds in your behalf. Yet we fancy the clouds to be _her_ foes also. She
comes on magnifying her dangers by her light, revealing, displaying them
in all their hugeness and blackness, then suddenly casts them behind into
the light concealed, and goes her way triumphant through a small space of
clear sky.
In short, the moon traversing, or appearing to traverse, the small clouds
which lie in her way, now obscured by them, now easily dissipating and
shining through them, makes the drama of the moonlight night to all
watchers and night-travellers. Sailors speak of it as the moon eating up
the clouds. The traveller all alone, the moon all alone, except for his
sympathy, overcoming with incessant victory whole squadrons of clouds
above the forests and lakes and hills. When she is obscured he so
sympathizes with her that he could whip a dog for her relief, as Indians
do. When she enters on a clear field of great extent in the heavens, and
shines unobstructedly, he is glad. And when she has fought her way through
all the squadron of her foes, and rides majestic in a clear sky unscathed,
and there are no more any obstructions in her path, he cheerfully and
confidently pursues his way, and rejoices in his heart, and the cricket
also seems to express joy in its song.
How insupportable would be the days, if the night with its dews and
darkness did not come to restore the drooping world. As the shades begin
to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we steal
forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of
those silent and brooding thoughts which are the natural prey of the
intellect.
Richter says that "The earth is every day overspread with the veil of
night for the same reason as the cages of birds are darkened, viz: that we
may the more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought in the hush
and quiet of darkness. Thoughts which day turns into smoke and mist, stand
about us in the night as light and flames; even as the column which
fluctuates above the crater of Vesuvius, in the daytime appears a pillar
of cloud, but by night a pillar of fire."
There are nights in this climate of such serene and majestic beauty, so
medicinal and fertilizing to the spirit, that methinks a sensitive nature
would not devote them to oblivion, and perhaps there is no man but would
be better and wiser for spending them out of doors, though he should sleep
all the next day to pay for it; should sleep an Endymion sleep, as the
ancients expressed it,--nights which warrant the Grecian epithet
ambrosial, when, as in the land of Beulah, the atmosphere is charged with
dewy fragrance, and with music, and we take our repose and have our dreams
awake,--when the moon, not secondary to the sun,
"gives us his blaze again,
Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day.
