The light is more proportionate to our
knowledge
than that of day.
Thoreau - Excursions and Poems
"
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.
Now through the passing cloud she seems to stoop,
Now up the pure cerulean rides sublime. "
Diana still hunts in the New England sky.
"In Heaven queen she is among the spheres.
She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure.
Eternity in her oft change she bears;
She Beauty is; by her the fair endure.
"Time wears her not; she doth his chariot guide;
Mortality below her orb is placed;
By her the virtues of the stars down slide;
By her is Virtue's perfect image cast. "
The Hindoos compare the moon to a saintly being who has reached the
last stage of bodily existence.
Great restorer of antiquity, great enchanter! In a mild night when the
harvest or hunter's moon shines unobstructedly, the houses in our
village, whatever architect they may have had by day, acknowledge only
a master. The village street is then as wild as the forest. New and
old things are confounded. I know not whether I am sitting on the
ruins of a wall, or on the material which is to compose a new one.
Nature is an instructed and impartial teacher, spreading no crude
opinions, and flattering none; she will be neither radical nor
conservative. Consider the moonlight, so civil, yet so savage!
The light is more proportionate to our knowledge than that of day. It
is no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind's habitual
atmosphere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminated
moments are.
"In such a night let me abroad remain
Till morning breaks, and all's confused again. "
Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of
an inward dawn? --to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if
the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and
glaring.
When Ossian, in his address to the sun, exclaims,--
"Where has darkness its dwelling?
Where is the cavernous home of the stars,
When thou quickly followest their steps,
Pursuing them like a hunter in the sky,--
Thou climbing the lofty hills,
They descending on barren mountains? "
who does not in his thought accompany the stars to their "cavernous
home," "descending" with them "on barren mountains"?
Nevertheless, even by night the sky is blue and not black, for we see
through the shadow of the earth into the distant atmosphere of day,
where the sunbeams are reveling.
TRANSLATIONS
THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF AESCHYLUS
PERSONS OF THE DRAMA
KRATOS _and_ BIA (Strength and Force).
HEPHAISTUS (Vulcan).
PROMETHEUS.
CHORUS OF OCEAN NYMPHS.
OCEANUS.
IO, _Daughter of Inachus_.
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.
Now through the passing cloud she seems to stoop,
Now up the pure cerulean rides sublime. "
Diana still hunts in the New England sky.
"In Heaven queen she is among the spheres.
She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure.
Eternity in her oft change she bears;
She Beauty is; by her the fair endure.
"Time wears her not; she doth his chariot guide;
Mortality below her orb is placed;
By her the virtues of the stars down slide;
By her is Virtue's perfect image cast. "
The Hindoos compare the moon to a saintly being who has reached the
last stage of bodily existence.
Great restorer of antiquity, great enchanter! In a mild night when the
harvest or hunter's moon shines unobstructedly, the houses in our
village, whatever architect they may have had by day, acknowledge only
a master. The village street is then as wild as the forest. New and
old things are confounded. I know not whether I am sitting on the
ruins of a wall, or on the material which is to compose a new one.
Nature is an instructed and impartial teacher, spreading no crude
opinions, and flattering none; she will be neither radical nor
conservative. Consider the moonlight, so civil, yet so savage!
The light is more proportionate to our knowledge than that of day. It
is no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind's habitual
atmosphere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminated
moments are.
"In such a night let me abroad remain
Till morning breaks, and all's confused again. "
Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of
an inward dawn? --to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if
the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and
glaring.
When Ossian, in his address to the sun, exclaims,--
"Where has darkness its dwelling?
Where is the cavernous home of the stars,
When thou quickly followest their steps,
Pursuing them like a hunter in the sky,--
Thou climbing the lofty hills,
They descending on barren mountains? "
who does not in his thought accompany the stars to their "cavernous
home," "descending" with them "on barren mountains"?
Nevertheless, even by night the sky is blue and not black, for we see
through the shadow of the earth into the distant atmosphere of day,
where the sunbeams are reveling.
TRANSLATIONS
THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF AESCHYLUS
PERSONS OF THE DRAMA
KRATOS _and_ BIA (Strength and Force).
HEPHAISTUS (Vulcan).
PROMETHEUS.
CHORUS OF OCEAN NYMPHS.
OCEANUS.
IO, _Daughter of Inachus_.
