Chancing to take a memorable walk by moonlight some years ago, I resolved
to take more such walks, and make acquaintance with another side of
nature: I have done so.
According to Pliny, there is a stone in Arabia called Selenites, "wherein
is a white, which increases and decreases with the moon." My journal for
the last year or two, has been _selenitic_ in this sense.
Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not tempted
to explore it,--to penetrate to the shores of its lake Tchad, and discover
the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon? Who knows
what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are there to be found? In
the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, there is
where all Niles have their hidden heads. The expeditions up the Nile as
yet extend but to the Cataracts, or perchance to the mouth of the White
Nile; but it is the Black Nile that concerns us.
I shall be a benefactor if I conquer some realms from the night, if I
report to the gazettes anything transpiring about us at that season worthy
of their attention,--if I can show men that there is some beauty awake
while they are asleep,--if I add to the domains of poetry.
Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day. I soon discovered
that I was acquainted only with its complexion, and as for the moon, I had
seen her only as it were through a crevice in a shutter, occasionally. Why
not walk a little way in her light?
Suppose you attend to the suggestions which the moon makes for one month,
commonly in vain, will it not be very different from anything in
literature or religion? But why not study this Sanscrit? What if one moon
has come and gone with its world of poetry, its weird teachings, its
oracular suggestions,--so divine a creature freighted with hints for me,
and I have not used her? One moon gone by unnoticed?
I think it was Dr. Chalmers who said, criticising Coleridge, that for his
part he wanted ideas which he could see all round, and not such as he must
look at away up in the heavens. Such a man, one would say, would never
look at the moon, because she never turns her other side to us. The light
which comes from ideas which have their orbit as distant from the earth,
and which is no less cheering and enlightening to the benighted traveller
than that of the moon and stars, is naturally reproached or nicknamed as
moonshine by such. They are moonshine, are they? Well, then do your
night-travelling when there is no moon to light you; but I will be
thankful for the light that reaches me from the star of least magnitude.
Stars are lesser or greater only as they appear to us so. I will be
thankful that I see so much as one side of a celestial idea,--one side of
the rainbow,--and the sunset sky.
Men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if they knew its qualities very
well, and despised them; as owls might talk of sunshine. None of your
sunshine,--but this word commonly means merely something which they do not
understand,--which they are abed and asleep to, however much it may be
worth their while to be up and awake to it.
It must be allowed that the light of the moon, sufficient though it is for
the pensive walker, and not disproportionate to the inner light we have,
is very inferior in quality and intensity to that of the sun.
