No More Learning

"Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen; howl, O ye vinedressers. . . .

"The vine is dried up, and the fig tree languisheth; the pomegranate
tree, the palm tree also, and the apple tree, even all the trees of
the field, are withered: because joy is withered away from the sons of
men. "




NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT


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 Sanskrit? 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 traveler 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 traveling 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.