Stars and Stripes

“ WE have just obtained a close view of one of the stars of the Galaxy,—the nearest star, our own sun,—and have gazed in admiration at the pearly setting of its corona, the turbulent waves of its crimson atmosphere, its black spots and moving belts, and our admiration increases as we visualize in our mind's eye, the eight fine planets which swing unceasingly around in its beautiful light. ”

“ If he beams at all, it is not the hurried scintillation of the twinkling multitude around him. Rising through a moisture-laden and wind-swept sky, where the stars are like pulsating atoms, shaken apart and scattered in tinsel showers of rainbow sparks, he glows unflickering, recognizing the aerial tumult only by a deepening of [Pg 124] color which makes him the more imposing. As he mounts the heights of the sky he gleams ever brighter and ever steadier, and, casting off the tarnish of the horizon, his supereminent light glows with a splendor that is amazing. ”

“ After once recognizing a few of these constellations or beholding through a telescope the glories of a double star or the face of a distant world, one will never again fail through indifference to raise his eyes to the heavens. There is one thing certain—if all the wondrous phenomena of visible stars could be seen on but one of the nights of our long ride about the sun, the civilized world would spend its last cent on glasses and sit up until dawn to feast its eyes on the sublimity of the spectacle. ”

“ The Stars.
In the great body of nature-myth the stars are prominent members. In their multitude; their sublime repose in upper calms above the turmoil of the elements; their varying brilliancy, “one star differing from another star in glory”; their tremulous light; their scattered positions, which lend themselves to every vagary of the constellation-maker; their slow procession, varied only by sweeping comet and meteor, or falling showers of shooting stars; they lead the imagination into gentler ways than do the vaster bodies of the most ancient heavens. ”

“ Over his head, through immeasurable distances, the dark blue space was lighted by the great multitude of the stars, whose glittering ranks have in that atmosphere a distinctness and a glory unseen with us. Perhaps no scene of beauty in the visible creation has proved a more hackneyed theme for the poet and the philosopher than a starry night. ”

“ To scale the stars, and soar from pole to pole.
But as the clearest hemisphere displays
The wandering star, amidst the radiant blaze,
Of orb o'er orb, that aids the nightly dance,
Of planets rolling through the broad expanse;
Some visionary souls have lost their way,
Eccentric wandering 'mid the noon tide ray. ”

“ The sky outside was as black as the darkness within the sphere, but the shape of the open window was marked by an infinite number of stars.
Those who have only seen the starry sky from the earth cannot imagine its when the vague, half-luminous veil of our air has been withdrawn. The stars we see on earth are the mere scattered survivors that penetrate our misty atmosphere. But now at last I could realise the meaning of the hosts of heaven!
Stranger things we were presently to see, but that airless, star-dusted sky! ”

“ Suddenly he saw that there were stars—millions upon countless millions of them dusted across the dome of the pale heavens as carelessly as a baker might dust silvered sugar over the icing of a festal cake. Big stars and tiny stars and mere little diffusive glows of light that might come from a thousand worlds, clustering together out there in infinite void. ”

“ At no other season do the heavenly bodies seem so intimately associated with the earth as in summer. All nature is now attuned, and the stars glow softly in the tepid atmosphere, stirred by faint breezes, like veritable flowers of the sky. The firmament becomes a vast garden lit with beautiful lamps, which seem to have been placed there to dimly illuminate nocturnal wanderers in the transparent gloom beneath. Their beauty is as refreshing as the cooling breath of night itself. A mystic influence steals from them over the earth. ”

“ It seemed more congenial just to lie there, and muse and watch the dying of the day as the brightness gradually faded out of the western sky, and the stars in their modest way, one by one, came out into conscious vision, until the whole heavens were lit up by their radiance. ”

“ One star down quite low, near the horizon, and one almost in a straight line above, and one at either side equal distances apart, like an old four-cornered kite. You must imagine the cross. But it’s hardly what it’s cracked up to be!” And we blink at the stars, and they blink at us, and we feel strangely unreal and turned about. ”

“ Viewed through the window of the earth's cold and icy atmosphere, the stars seen during the winter part of the journey seem to scintillate with particular brilliancy. Since we are then passing by the most colorful stars and the most spectacular star groups the gorgeousness of these scenes is unequaled. During the summer the stars are more demure and tranquil in their light but their soft fires gleam with the gold of romance which the ancient people cast about them in journeys of the past. ”

“ It exists at certain seasons in the remote twilight, above dark and tapestried moors, there where the evening star hangs wet and gold, or, at the moment when the young Cinderella moon puts her silver slipper upon the stairway of the west, departing at the given signal, before all the glory of the stars is come. ”

“ This star glowed as brightly as the planet Venus, which outshines every star in the sky. It was so bright that it was even visible in the daytime! This brilliancy then commenced to diminish, the star growing fainter and fainter until in about a year and a half it had completely disappeared.
While new stars have been noted during the course of centuries, the appearance of one is always so unusual that it stands out against the background of the sky with almost a disquieting effect. ”

“ She raised her eyes to the bright stars, looking down so mildly from the wide worlds of air, and, gazing on them, found new stars burst upon her view, and more beyond, and more beyond again, until the whole great expanse sparkled with shining spheres, rising higher and higher in immeasurable space, eternal in their numbers as in their changeless and incorruptible existence. ”

“ The tendency of stars to assemble in immense clouds, swarms, and clusters. The existence in some of the richest regions of the universe of absolutely black, starless gaps, deeps, or holes, as if one were looking out of a window into the murkiest night. The marvelous phenomena of new, or temporary, stars, which appear as suddenly as conflagrations, and often turn into something else as eccentric as themselves. ”

“ The light of the stars falls coldly on the waters; the air is chill and frosty; if we look further, we perceive in the distance forms of beauty floating on: dark is the night around, but the stars are bright. ”

“ Do not you know that the stars are often falling? They drop into other worlds than ours. Sometimes they plump into our earth, fizz into the sea, and lie on the ooze, shining for awhile and making queer lights upon the water like that yonder. ”

“ The tremendous truth that on a starry night we look, in every direction, into an almost endless vista of suns beyond suns and systems upon systems, was too overwhelming for comprehension by the inventors of the constellations. So they amused themselves, like imaginative children, as they were, by tracing the outlines of men and beasts formed by those pretty lights, the stars. They turned the starry heavens into a scroll filled with pictured stories of mythology. ”

“ The stars—as we term the myriad other worlds that are rushing down beside us through the eternal silence—were put into the heavens to make the sky look interesting for us at night; and the moon with its dark mysteries and ever-hidden face is an arrangement for us to flirt under. ”

“ You wouldn't do that; for when you stood before that avalanche of tacks, what you saw was not tacks—relatively useful objects—but something perfectly valueless and senseless in its profusion, something as purposeless as are the stars in the sky. Of course, such a mound of new and shining tacks was often an uplifting sight, and even inspired poetical reflections as do the stars in the sky. They seemed created to be gazed upon in silent wonder. It was a fine sight in its way, as a piece of landscape, just as the sea is from that point of view. ”

“ And stars as golden blossoms;
As man looks at them from the earth,
His heart strange feelings bosoms.
And all the time more and more stars
Appear without a bound there—
And yet not ev’ry little star
Can easily be found there. ”

“ To the true lover of the stars, one universe or a million makes not a whit of difference. The silent song of the heavens is as sweet today, its mystery as alluring, its delights more marvelous, than in the days of yore when planets rolled out heavenly notes and stars shone through the seven spheres of pure, translucent crystal. ”

“ If you happen to glance at the sky at a point many degrees away from the place where they shine, your eye will inevitably be drawn to them. They have greater attractive power than a single large star, and the effect of their intermingled rays [Pg 110] is truly fascinating. ”

“ That night the Fifth went skyward in a great thundering that rolled louder and louder across the cities and the countryside. Great black bulks flying up fast across the glittering sky, roaring, bellowing, shouting a gigantic farewell down to the watching millions as they rushed out toward the stars. ”

“ Just as when looking into the red coals of a fire, or when watching the clouds, our imagination conjures up strange and grotesque forms, so did the men of old see in the grouping of the stars the outlines of weird and curious shapes. ”

“ Just as I know that the stars are now shining in the sky, though it is high noon. I never saw a star at midday, but I know it is the nature of stars to shine in the sky, and of the sky to hold its stars. ”

“ There are wonderful things to learn about the colour of the stars, some yellow like our own sun, others of a dazzling whiteness, and others giving out beautiful rainbow-coloured light. But these wonders you must study by-and-by; just now we will speak first of their amazing number, as they appear to our eyes when by the help of the telescope we peer deeper and deeper into the blue depths of the sky. ”

“ Under the Stars.
Under the stars, when the shadows fall,
Under the stars of night;
What is so fair as the jeweled crown
Of the azure skies, when the sun is down,
Beautiful stars of light!
Under the stars, where the daisies lie
Lifeless beneath the snow;
Lovely and pure, they have lived a day,
Silently passing forever away,
Lying so meek and low.
Under the stars in the long-ago—
Under the stars to-night;
Life is the same, with its great unrest
Wearily throbbing within each breast,
Searching for truth and light.
Under the stars as they drift along,
Far in the azure seas ”

“ Each star was a thing apart from all other stars, a sacred inviolate thing. On the earth, under the stars everything was corrupt, the trees, flowers, grasses, the beasts of the field, men and women. They were all corrupt. ”

“ There is an attraction about these solitary bright stars that is almost mystical, their very loneliness lending interest to the view, as when one watches some distant snow-clad peak gleaming in the rays of sunset after all the lower mountains have sunk into the blue shadows of coming night. ”

“ When we started, it was in that clear crystal dark that looks as if you could see through it forever till you reached infinite things, and we seemed to be in a great hollow sphere, and the stars were like living beings who had the night to themselves. ”

“ I remember we sat under the stars that night after the world was folded up, and asleep, and I think we really felt the stars as we sat there—not as a roof for theories of the world, but we felt them as stars—shared the night with them, lit our hearts at them. ”

“ When we gaze up into the sky at night, we see the stars twinkling far away, and we may remark here that this twinkling of the stars is due to the atmosphere and the changes in its power of refraction, and of course the star’s light changes its direction. ”

“ In the other seasons of the year, and particularly in summer, the twilight gleam encroaches, so to speak, upon a portion of the nights, which are otherwise so brief, and precludes our vision from any exact estimate of the stars. Those demitints, those soft subdued reflections of light, scarcely permit the eye to distinguish even stars of the first and second magnitude, which shine like spots of dull gold on a background of pale silver. ”

“ The glass reveals to us the fact that the "star-dust" which we call the Milky Way is an accumulation of innumerable single stars. Sweeping the blue expanse with the telescope, we find some stars are golden, some green, others purple, many silvery white, and some are twins. ”

“ We cannot see the starlight waves while the sun's great light is shining upon us; but you know how beautifully they shine on clear nights, when there is neither sunlight nor moonlight to quench their soft beams.
But after all, the stars are so far away that we must think specially of our own star, the sun, as the source of light and heat; he also makes for us all form and colour, and gives us the pictures drawn by his light which we call photographs, and which make us know something of people we have never seen, and places which we may never visit. ”