Moonshining

“ When we can explain the nature of this force adherent to moonlight, and to no other light, we may inquire why, in all ages and in all lands, the verdict of experience points to moonlight as a factor in the production and aggravation of lunacy. An empirical hypothesis, of course; but in the better sense, as well as in the worse. For the perturbing influence of moonlight, if it be a myth, is about the most tenacious one on earth. ”

“ Ridiculously enough, though I have not journeyed only in the moonlight, yet I have from my earliest youth forever taken note of the influence of its light, have never in any region missed the light of the full moon and I dream of being, not quite an Endymion, but yet a favorite of the moon. When it returns, its orb little by little growing full, I cannot suppress a feeling of longing while I gaze upon it, whether in meadow and woodland, on the mountains or in the city itself and in my own room. ”

“ And how useful in this respect is the moon! Volumes might be filled with the poetry of the moon; and yet the theme is ever fresh. The poet and the painter find the subject to be inexhaustible. The aspect of nature in moonlight is so different, that we have, by the gift of the lesser light, virtually two worlds for our abode. The gorgeous sunlit scene gives way, like a dissolving view, to the milder radiance of the moon, and, as by a magic spell, a new scene, with its own characteristic beauty, starts out from nature's canvas. The picturesque effects of moonlight are infinitely varied ”

“ It was all moonshine, apparently a reflection of light from our earth, when sixteen times the amount of light showered on us at full moon is then thrown by us on her! But a hole through the middle of the moon, perhaps twenty miles round! There is no air that we know of on the half of the moon that we see, and there is no water. There are ample traces of volcanic fires that once lighted her surface, but they are all long gone out, and have left nothing behind for us but insoluble problems and mysterious wonders—a world of craters, lava, precipices, and cinders. ”

“ It is when the moon is about to be hidden behind a dark, impenetrable veil that the spectator may expect to see the most wonderful display of pictures above and around him. As the cloud approaches the moon, the blue background deepens in color and brilliancy and when its dark margin touches the rim of the moon it is changed into a fringe of gold or silver; with the disappearance of the moon behind the cloud the fringe of the latter is rudely torn away, the water beneath is robbed of its carpet of silver, and the captivated observer is made aware that the darkness of night is upon him. ”

“ Yet were there many who hated the moon king and the ways of the Dweller. Battles there were and the whole land sickened. It was at this time that the evil Taithu set in place the pale stone whose keys are the moon rays and which you opened. They set it there that all who doubted might see the moon summon its spirit; but more than that to guard the Moon Pool against those whose doubts could not be stilled and who might creep in seeking to destroy. For only when the moon was full, all of its silver radiance streaming upon earth, could the Shining One draw strength to pass forth. ”

“ Many a time have I hauled a sleeping man out of the glare of the tropical moon for fear of its direful beams, and many a time have I had the like service done to me. Few old seamen but have some strange yarn to spin anent the strange effects of the moon upon the human countenance exposed to its sinister rays: in most cases it is some hours' or some days' moon-blindness; sometimes it is a queer contraction of the muscles on the side of the face exposed ”

“ With the rising of the moon all the violet of the sky flushes;—there is almost such a rose-color as heralds northern dawn.
Then the moon appears over the mornes, very large, very bright—brighter certainly than many a befogged sun one sees in northern Novembers; and it seems to have a weird magnetism—this tropical moon. Night-birds, insects, frogs,—everything that can sing,—all sing very low on the nights of great moons. Tropical wood-life begins with dark: in the immense white light of a full moon this nocturnal life seems afraid to cry out as usual. ”

“ LYING TO—HEART AND INSTINCT—SPARROWS VIEWED AS CONSUMERS—MIGRATIONS—POSTING A LETTER IN THE PACIFIC—CANNIBALS—ADVENTURES OF A LOCKET.
The glimpse of moonshine only lasted a second, but it was sufficient to light up the valley of the shadow of death. All around was again enveloped in obscurity. The moon, like a modest benefactor who hides himself from those to whose wants he has ministered, concealed itself behind its screen of blackness.
The pinnace was thrown into stays, and they resolved to lie-to till daybreak. There might be rocks to windward as well as to leeward ”

“ Only in this land of sunshine and magnolias will you find this wonderful bird. It never wanders far from the Gulf. It flourishes best amid the magnolias, and it fills the southern woods with music. It sings at all hours; at night, when the Moon is looking kindly down upon the Earth, and the Earth is serenely smiling to the Moon, its clear notes ring out joyously, until even the stars from their glittering palaces lean down to listen. ”

“ This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. ”

“ Few white men behold these statuesque stones in the moonlight, or in the gray light and white mists of the morning. At midday they seem dead or asleep while standing; but when the moon is shining above them and the wanderer below looks up to them, lo! the moon stands still and these mighty crags start forth, advancing noiselessly. His back is frozen, and even in the yielding sand his feet are held fast by terror—a delicious, ghostly terror, withal! ”

“ Whence came that marrow-freezing fear I shall never know, or why. What I saw was simply such a grotesque distortion of the moon’s disc as is often witnessed in low latitudes, when either sun or moon rising appears to have the lower limb glued to the horizon for quite an appreciable time, while fragments of mist or cloud passing over the luminous and elongated face cause strange patterns to appear upon it. And when suddenly the connection seems to break, the luminary apparently springs several degrees at a bound into the clear sky above. ”

“ As moonlight that softens into beauty every angle on which it falls, seemed his presence, — as moonlight vanishes, and things assume their common aspect of the rugged and the mean, he receded from her eyes — and the outward scene was commonplace once more. ”

“ The moonbeams trail their shrouds;
Their tattered cerements
Cling to the gauzy clouds,
In ribbons frayed and thin—
And startled by the light
Silence shrinks deeper in
The depths of night.
Useless lie spades and rakes;
Rust's on the garden-tools.
Yet, where the moonlight makes
Nebulous silver pools
A ghostly shape is cast—
Something unseen has stirred.... ”

“ And above it, tangled in the plumes and spirals that throbbed and whirled were seven glowing lights.
Through all the incessant but strangely ordered movement of the—thing—these lights held firm and steady. They were seven—like seven little moons. One was of a pearly pink, one of a delicate nacreous blue, one of lambent saffron, one of the emerald you see in the shallow waters of tropic isles; a deathly white; a ghostly amethyst; and one of the silver that is seen only when the flying fish leap beneath the moon. ”

“ We design this chapter to be the completion of moon-worship, and at the same time an anticipation of those lunary superstitions which are but scattered leaves from luniolatry, the parent tree. If the new moon, with its waxing light, may represent the primitive nature-worship which spread over the earth; and the full moon, the deity who is supposed to regulate our reservoirs and supplies of water: the waning moon may fitly typify the grotesque and sickly superstition, which, under the progress of radiant science and spiritual religion, is readier every hour to vanish away. ”

“ By moonlight we see not distinctly even the surface of the earth, but our daylight experience supplies us with confidence.
As I approached the pond down Hubbard’s Path, after coming out of the woods into a warmer air, I saw the shimmering of the moon on its surface, and, in the 252 near, now flooded cove, the water-bugs, darting, circling about, made streaks or curves of light. The moon’s inverted pyramid of shimmering light commenced about twenty rods off, like so much micaceous sand. ”

“ No doubt, on the earth, as the contours of the moon slowly blurred and became indistinct, with the accumulation of vapor around its now ragged rim, there must have been terror and consternation. And as the moon slowly evaporated in the skies a virtual panic must have ensued among the Earth's people. ”

“ We crawled through stony ravines, over snow slopes, amidst fungi that ripped like thin bladders at our thrust, emitting a watery humour, over a perfect pavement of things like puff-balls, and beneath interminable thickets of scrub. And ever more helplessly our eyes sought for our abandoned sphere. The noise of the mooncalves would at times be a vast flat calf-like sound, at times it rose to an amazed and wrathy bellowing, and again it would become a clogged bestial sound, as though these unseen creatures had sought to eat and bellow at the same time. ”

“ So long as they are humanly made, and so long as it is this flood of moonlight from which the Dweller draws its power of materialization, the Dweller itself, if not the product of the human mind, is at least dependent upon the product of the human mind for its appearance."
"Wait a minute, Goodwin," interrupted O'Keefe. "Do you mean to say you think that this thing is made of—well—of moonshine?"
"Moonlight," I replied, "is, of course, reflected sunlight. But the rays which pass back to earth after their impact on the moon's surface are profoundly changed. ”

“ The moon slab is of some material that reacts to moonlight. The circles over the top are, without doubt, its operating agency. When the light strikes them they release the mechanism that opens the slab, just as you can open doors with sunlight by an ingenious arrangement of selenium-cells. Apparently it takes the strength of the full moon to do this. We will first try a concentration of the rays of the nearly full moon upon these circles to see whether that will open the rock. ”

“ Most observers will agree with Schmidt, that observations and drawings of objects on the sombre depressed plains of the moon are easier and pleasanter to make than on the dazzling highlands, and that the lunar "sea" is to the working selenographer like an oasis in the desert to the traveller—a relief in this case, however, not to an exhausted body, but to a weary eye. ”

“ The wild, white moon, nearly at the full, was plunging swiftly through heavy masses of gray cloud, that at times quite obscured her light, and the solid shapes of hill and wood, and the sweeping, changing shadows were so mingled that it was hard to distinguish what was real earth and what was but the effect of cloud and wind-blown moonshine. ”

“ What influence does the moon exercise upon the sleeper? It was earlier discussed, along with the various psychical overdeterminations, that the moonlight awoke first the infantile pleasure memories, among other things that that light shining everywhere lighted the way which led to the house and the dwelling of the earliest childhood. Mention was made of the infantile comparison of the moon's disk with the childish nates and perhaps the gazing upon the nightly orb, which seems besides most like a hypnotic fixation, may be also referred back to the same. ”

“ The brown and green recesses of the grotto were at once murkier, and yet more distinctly visible, for the glow of the fire, flickering through the crevices of the metal door of the furnace, had begun to assert its luminous quality, which was hardly perceptible in the full light of day, and brought out the depth of the shadows. The figures and faces of the moonshiners showed against the deepening gloom. The sunset clouds were still red without; a vague roseate suffusion was visible through the falling water. ”

“ Thousands, indeed millions, of little stones were piled about in ugly confusion, and marred the soft, bright sand the sea people so loved, but they were powerless to prevent it. The Moon sprites went back to their work of fastening the moon-ladder to the Earth, and the Sea King invited them to remain for his daughter’s wedding the next night. ”

“ Wonderful moonshine this evening, light as day; and along with it aurora borealis, yellow and strange in the white moonlight; a large ring round the moon—all this over the great stretch of white, shining ice, here and there in our neighborhood piled up high by the pressure. And in the midst of this silent silvery ice-world the windmill sweeps round its dark wings against the deep-blue sky and the aurora. A strange contrast: civilization making a sudden incursion into this frozen ghostly world.
“To-morrow is the Fram’s birthday. How many memories it recalls of the launch-day a year ago! ”

“ They are as common in China, where the moon is still worshipped, as they are in England, where, in some places, old men still touch their hats and maidens still bob a courtesy in sight of the new moon. Thus the relics of moon-worship are about us still, as well as a strong popular belief that the moon is an active physical agent. That the actual influence of the moon on the tides lies at the basis of the belief in its influence on the weather is probable ”