Stars

“ 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. ”

“ I see the great stars rise and fall,
The rounding seasons come and go,
The tided oceans ebb and flow;
The tokens of a central force,
Whose circles, in their widening course,
O'erlap and move the universe;
The workings of the law whence springs
The rhythmic harmony of things,
Which shapes in earth the darkling spar,
And orbs in heaven the morning star. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Like those first stars, whose silver beams on high,
Shining more brightly as the day goes by,
Most travellers cannot at first descry,
But eyes that wont to range the evening sky,
And know celestial lights, do plainly see,
And gladly hail them, numbering two or three;
For lore that 's deep must deeply studied be,
As from deep wells men read star-poetry.
These stars are never pal'd, though out of sight,
But like the sun they shine forever bright;
Aye, they are suns, though earth must in its flight
Put out its eyes that it may see their light. ”

“ Well, then do your night-travelling 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. ”

“ Wise little runaway stars!
Far up above them the other stars
(Poor little patient things!)
Sit in the sky and study the clouds
Folding their sad little wings;
With the stern moon to watch them they sit and sigh:
“Won’t lessons be over, by and by?
We want to go down to the earth and fly!”
Runaway, runaway stars! ”

“ The stars are bright heavenly bodies, fixed in the firmament of heaven by the word of the Most High. They enlighten the earth, distinguish the night from the day, and adorn the heavens; and they are signs and tokens of nature, of judgment, of mercy, of seasons, days, and years. ”

“ A star shone forth in heaven above all the other stars, the light of which was inexpressible, while its novelty struck men with astonishment. And all the rest of the stars, with the sun and moon, formed a chorus to this star, and its light was exceedingly great above them all. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The moon pouring strange light on things more strange,
Looks she unheedfully on seas and lands
Trembling with change and fear of counterchange?
O, not earth trembles, but the stars, the stars!
The sky is shaken and the cool air is quivering.
I cannot look up to the crowded height
And see the fair stars trembling in their light,
For thinking of the starlike spirits of men
Crowding the earth and with great passion quivering:—
Stars quenched in anger and hate, stars sick with pity. ”

“ The colours of the stars,—not only those
That burn in heaven, but those that long since perished,
Those vanished suns that eyes can still behold,
The strange lost stars whose light still reaches earth
Although they died ten thousand years ago.
Here, night by night, the innumerable heavens
Speak to an eye more sensitive than man's,
Write on the camera's delicate retina
A thousand messages, lines of dark and bright
That speak of elements unknown on earth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Figure in your mind’s eye each one of those stars in the likeness of a majestic sun, as big, warm, and bright as our sun, and look at other parts of the sky and repeat the process with the other constellations, and your conception of the magnificence of the starry system will begin to assume proper proportions. ”

“ You see, my son, this wide and large firmament over our heads, where the sun and moon, and all the stars, appear in their turn: if you was to be carried up to any of these bodies, you would discover others as much above you, as the stars are above this earth. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ And so are herbs and flowers trite, the stars in the heavens common, but once in a while there appears from the ground a shoot so new that botany marvels, a star in the sky so strange that astronomers gape in the wonder of a discovery. ”

“ From this universal attention to the stars, there sprang up the myriad fancies and peculiar notions, the products of imagination, that peopled the sky with animals and quaint figures, and gave rise to the constellated stellar groups that have come down to us, and figure on the modern charts of the heavens. ”

“ Once a man sat at night and looked up at the heavens, seeking to know what the stars were saying. He besought the stars, praying to them and asking them to listen to the voice of the water, and to the voice of the oaks and to the whispers of the grasses, and to tell him why the fire of earth was red, while the fire of the stars was white. ”

“ The stars send us not only that visible and gross light which strikes our bodily eyes, but from them also comes to us a light far more subtle, which illuminates our minds and whose effects I shall try to show you. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the other side, wonders still more astonishing: stars revealing to us their forms and the most minute details of their structure, as if they had left the depths of space to offer themselves submissively to our study; worlds intrusting the secrets of the matter that engenders them to the rays which they send us; and the history of the sky written by the sky itself. Finally, by the united efforts of the two, the entire universe, in its majesty and its grandeur, become the intellectual domain of man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is so much clearer, and the stars are therefore so much brighter here than in the dense atmosphere where we inhabit, that the traveler, half chilled and sleeping, rouses himself to contemplate the brilliant sights above him. The brightest stars that he has watched from childhood up, are brighter now than ever. ”

“ About half-way your attention will be arrested by a remarkable stellar arrangement, in which a beautiful half-circle of small stars curving above a larger star, which is reddish in color, is conspicuous. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The stars are the landmarks of the universe; and, amidst the endless and complicated fluctuations of our system, seem placed by its Creator as guides and records, not merely to elevate our minds by the contemplation of what is vast, but to teach us to direct our actions by reference to what is immutable in His works. ”

“ Between us and the stars stretch vast regions empty of all matter. But we see the stars; their light reaches us, even though it may take centuries to do so. We conceive, then, that it is the universal ether which conveys that light. ”

“ Some are like single stars, others like double stars and clusters of stars; and although the ground in winter is covered with myriads of them, yet each one is formed with as much correctness and beauty as if God had made each one for special examination and as an exhibition of His infinite skill and divine perfection. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On a sky of inky blackness stars innumerable were spread, among which the orbs forming our constellations could be recognized by their superior lustre, but yet were almost lost amid myriads of stars unseen by the inhabitants of earth. ”

“ And we see that there are many stars; but not theirs the light that begins again to reveal object after object as gradually as they had disappeared; the moon is about to rise—is rising—has arisen—has taken her place high in heaven ”

“ On gazing upwards, we saw stars innumerable glittering in the sky, so it seemed, but in vain we looked for those to which our eyes were accustomed, though it was difficult to persuade ourselves that they were not veritable stars. ”

“ When thus concentrated, they will perform for our intellectual world what the sun does for that magnificent world of effulgent stars and constellations with which he is surrounded—by diffusing in every direction that genial light and heat, so essential to adorn, to sustain, and to invigorate both. ”

“ When attention is concentrated on the scene the thousands of stars on each side of the Milky Way will fill the mind with the consciousness of a stupendous and all-embracing frame, beside which all human affairs sink into insignificance. ”

“ If the spectator had then specially examined amongst these eighteen millions of stars one of the most modest and least brilliant, a star of the fourth order, the one that proudly named itself the sun, all the phenomena to which the formation of the universe is due would have successively taken place under his eyes. ”