No More Learning

The smallest
recesses in the rocks are dim and cavernous; the ferns in the wood
appear of tropical size. 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 moonseed,--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 noontide 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 woodside to
hillside 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.