Demi-monde

“ Women were crowding up to the windows,—women from whom came the odor of iris and heliotrope. The sun shone on the artificial flowers in their hats, on satin, on lace, on false and genuine diamond ear-rings, on jet glittering like armor on projecting bosoms increased with india-rubber, on blackened brows, and on faces covered with powder or rouge, and excited with the hope of amusement and play. The most practised eye could not distinguish the demi-monde who pretended to be women of society, from women of society who pretended to be of the demi-monde. ”

“ Many of them developed a taste for music, and prided themselves upon their culture. Eventually, when they became unclassed, they occupied themselves with toilette, scandal, tea, and talk about their lovers—dressed as far as possible in female clothes, painted, perfumed and curled their hair—addressed each other in the feminine gender, adopted pseudonyms of Countess or of Princess, and lived the life of women of a dubious demi-monde. ”

“ Or rugged freaks of mountain peaks,
Enjoy their solitude.
The heavens hold a sphere of gold,
A full and placid moon,
Suspended high, in cloudless sky,
With constellations strewn;
Its mellow beam, on rill and stream,
In silvery sheen I see;
Before its light, the shades of night
As evil spirits, flee.
In space afar, a shooting star,
With swift, uncertain course,
In dazzling sparks its passage marks,
As it expends its force ”

“ That death must swallow life, and darkness light.
But all at once the rack was blown away,
The snowstorm hushing ended in a sigh;
Then like a flame the crescent moon on high
Leaped forth among the planets; pure as they,
Earth vied in whiteness with the Milky Way:
Herself a star beneath the starry sky. ”

“ In that oft-repeated prophecy of our Lord concerning his second coming, it is said, "The sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven." Shall we then entertain so foolish an idea, as that the natural sunlight shall be obliterated; that the natural moon shall lose her power to shine; that the myraid of stars which stud the sky, many of them inconceivably larger than the earth on which we live, shall fall on this one small globe? ”

“ I cannot well describe it. More desolate than your moon, more terrible in its desolation. Vast mountains, waterless, treeless, huge masses of rock, coagulated blocks of star-forming matter—nothing living or moving. ”

“ Here was only a vast forest of dead and dying suns, stretched across the heavens, huge throngs of dark, burned-out stars, cold and black and barren, that crowded thick upon one another, with here and there a few dying suns of dark, smoky red, somber crimson stars in the last stages of stellar evolution. It was with the light of these few alone that the great mass faintly glowed, an expiring universe in which all light and life were sinking into darkness and death. ”

“ That golden globe of light, which is the center of our planetary system, shines forth in his glory, and spreads abroad the lucid day: he does not only emit his cheering rays to surrounding orbs, some of which revolve at immense distances, but, in running his prescribed course, measures out our time, renders our hours joyful, and without whose reviving beams we should dwell in perpetual darkness. The pale silver Moon gilds the shadows of the evening, and directs the feet of the benighted and lonely traveller in safety to his abode. ”

“ A sense of inexpressible remoteness was inspired by the trembling of the luminaries and the sharp shooting of the silver meteors as though all the life of this vast hushed universe of gloom were up there, and we had come to a pause upon the very verge of creation, with no other vitality in the misty confines save what the beating of our two hearts put into them. ”

“ The lesser stars fled at the slow approach of the moon, and in an hour she floated alone in the sky, save for the larger planets, Hooding the deep abysses of the night with a gleam of silver, tender and caressing that softened the angles and blotted details in brooding shadows. ”

“ We call the supernal lights fixed, yet they wander about yonder plain, and if I look again where I looked an hour ago, the face of the eternal heavens is altered. The silly moon and inconstant planets vary nightly their erratic dance; the sun itself, sovereign of the sky, ever and anon deserts his throne, and leaves his dominion to night and winter. ”

“ To enjoy this spectacle in all its magnificence, a night must be chosen when the atmosphere is perfectly pure and transparent—one neither illuminated by the moon, nor by the glimmer of twilight or of dawn. The heavens then resemble an immense sea, the broad expanse of which glitters with gold dust or diamonds. ”

“ The moon, almost departed, only cast over the landscape an uncertain and timorous gleam, which, in lieu of dissipating the gloom, only rendered the darkness visible, through the striking contrasts between the obscurity and the pale and fugitive rays of the declining planet. ”

“ Now fix your mind's eye upon that brilliant orb of—seeming—eternal day; that Sun which is ever shining, ah! whose light never pales, nor fails its vast empire. No storm-clouds obscure its brightness in the higher realm, neither is there waning of light, nor a wasting of its substance. Possibly, from all eternity of the past it has been, and through eternity to come it will remain the same. We, on this Earth, have our days and nights, our sun-shine and shadows, tempests [90] and storms. ”

“ The very globe itself, too, and all the fellow-planets that have lost their sun, are to become mere balls of ice, swinging silent in the darkness. Such is the light, which revisits us in the silence of the morning. ”

“ If the spirits and souls of the departed have any command of matter, why may not their intensest thoughts engrave themselves on a moon that, when dead and frozen, may reflect and shine as they did, while immersed in the depths of space? ”

“ As the great cosmic Bard of solar biology expresses it in his sublime epic:
The radiant flux and reflux, the serene
Atomic ebb and flow of force divine,
This, this alone, is God, the Demiurgus;
By this alone we are, and still shall be.
O joy! the Phantom of the Uncondition’d
Fades into nothingness before the breath
Of that eternal ever-effluent Life
Whose centre is the shining solar Heart
Of countless throbbing pulses, each a world! ”

“ How amazing it is that this ponderous globe should be suspended in the fluid air, without any visible support, and upheld only by the sovereign will of its almighty Creator! His power, who “hangeth the earth upon nothing,” is inconceivably great; and the revolutions of this globe produce the most beneficial effects. The daily rotation of the earth causes the uniform succession of light and darkness; and its annual motion occasions the difference of the length of the days and nights, and the beautiful diversity of the seasons. ”

“ So also is the hemisphere of this earth ever equally irradiated, although from the watery surfaces she from time to time sends her splendours unequally to the moon,—which like innumerable other stars we consider as another earth—in the same manner, she also sends hers to the earth, on account of the periodical changes which both experience in finding themselves now the one, now the other, nearer to the sun. ”

“ Turning, with suns that mock the sapphire-gem,
The constellated moons that mirror them
To ever-changing opals. On the flown
Horizons I have followed, all alone,
To meadows of mirage the deserts hem,
And sought to break the ghostly, golden stem
Of roses of illusion, briefly blown
By evanescent waters. One by one,
The outward ways of wonder I have trod
Through alien lives ineffable. ”

“ Nothing could be more beautiful, nothing purer, and more celestial, than this lunar globe floating in the silence of space, and sending back to us as in some fairy dream the solar illumination that floods it. ”

“ That which appears only like a thin and silvery cloud streaking the heaven is in effect composed of innumerable clusters of suns, each shining with its own light, and illuminating numbers of planets that revolve around them. Millions and millions of suns are ranged around us, all attended by innumerable worlds, yet calm, regular, and harmonious, all keeping the paths of immutable necessity. ”

“ Gradually, however, this matter settles round the great personalities, as clouds settle round great mountains, and in like manner as clouds dissolve into springs of living waters, spreading over plains, satisfying bodily thirst, so does this cosmic element resolve itself into poetry, hymns, songs and tragedies which satisfy the thirst of the soul. ”

“ The millions of suns, the millions of planets and moons, are all of them but shells on the shore of the everlasting sea of death and birth, and each would, if we could hear it, convey to our ears and hearts the one same murmur of pain. ”

“ This lays the foundation for a further advance in the contemplation of the wonderful works of the Creator, and justifies the hypothesis of a plurality of heavens; and we think the revelations of God, and revelations through the science of astronomy, will sustain the additional hypothesis that within what are denominated "suns" there are vast globes or worlds, separate and apart from the surrounding photosphere of ethereal fire, and that within what we denominate our sun, is our heaven. ”

“ With awe and admiration they have gazed at the planets shining [Pg 310] with great brilliancy and often making well-defined shadows, such as we are accustomed to look for from our nearest neighbor, the moon, when it is most brilliant during the harvest months. ”

“ Over me, around me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer, was the Eternal; that which was before the beginning, and that which triumphs over the end; that enormous void in which all light and life and being is but the thin and vanishing splendour of a falling star, the cold, the stillness, the silence—the infinite and final Night of space. ”

“ Most high and happy princess, we must tell you a tale of the Man in the Moon, which if it seem ridiculous for the method, or superfluous for the matter, or for the means incredible, for three faults we can make but one excuse: it is a tale of the Man in the Moon.
It was forbidden in old time to dispute of chimaera, because it was a fiction. We hope in our times none will apply pastimes, because they are fancies; for there liveth none under the sun that knows what to make of the Man in the Moon. We present neither comedy, nor tragedy, nor story, nor anything, but ... ”

“ The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,—and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky! ”

“ On him the light of star and moon Shall fall with purer radiance down; All constellations of the sky Shed their virtue through his eye. Him Nature giveth for defence His formidable innocence; The mounting sap, the shells, the sea, All spheres, all stones, his helpers be; ”

“ ⁠——The sky is overcast
With a continuous cloud of texture close,
Heavy and wan, all whitened by the Moon,
Which through that veil is indistinctly seen,
A dull, contracted circle, yielding light
So feebly spread that not a shadow falls,
Chequering the ground, from rock, plant, tree, or tower.
At length a pleasant instantaneous gleam
Startles the pensive traveller as he treads
His lonesome path, with unobserving eye
Bent earthwards; he looks up—the clouds are split
Asunder,—and above his head he sees
The clear moon, and the glory of the heavens.
There, in a black blue vault she sails along, ”

“ But, there is one broad sky over all the world, and whether it be blue or cloudy, the same heaven beyond it; ”

“ The moonlight flooded that great, silent land. The reaped fields lay yellow in it. The straw stacks and poplar windbreaks threw sharp black shadows. The roads were white rivers of dust. The sky was a deep, crystalline blue, and the stars were few and faint. Everything seemed to have succumbed, to have sunk to sleep, under the great, golden, tender, midsummer moon. The splendor of it seemed to transcend human life and human fate. ”

“ The earth is not in the centre of the Sun's orbit nor at the centre of the universe, but in the centre of its companion elements, and united with them. And any one standing on the moon, when it and the sun are both beneath us, would see this our earth and the element of water upon it just as we see the moon, and the earth would light it as it lights us. ”

“ How beautiful is night!
A dewy freshness fills the silent air,
No mist obscures, no little cloud
Breaks the whole serene of heaven:
In full-orbed glory the majestic moon
Rolls thro the dark blue depths.
Beneath her steady ray
The desert circle spreads,
Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky. ”

“ Solemnly seemest, like a vapoury cloud,
To rise before me—Rise, O ever rise,
Rise like a cloud of incense from the Earth!
Thou kingly Spirit throned among the hills,
Thou dread ambassador from Earth to Heaven,
Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, praises GOD.
1802 ”

“ A light is gone from yonder sky,
A star has left its sphere;
The beautiful—and do they die
In yon bright world as here?
Will that star leave a lonely place,
A darkness on the night?—
No; few will miss its lovely face,
And none think heaven less bright! ”

“ It is no secret that the moon has no light of her own, but is, as it were, a mirror, receiving brightness from the influence of the sun. ”

“ but when viewed in its inexhaustible extent, the sun, moon, stars, and constellations of the zodiac, are suspended in it, and all things are overspread by it. The earth before us is but a handful of soil; ”