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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 spot, 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 the 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 con

cerns 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 Sanscrit ? What if one moon has come and gone, with its world of poetry, its weird atachings, 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 traveller 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-travelling when there is no moon to light you; but I will

*Selenites, or the moon-stone, said to be still found in China, which is reported to increase and decrease with the Moon (Dyche).-En.

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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.

It must be allowed that the light of the moon, sufficient though it is for the pensive walker, and not disproportionate to the inner light we have, is very inferior in quality and intensity to that of the sun. But the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she sends to us, but also by her influence on the earth and its inhabitants. "The moon gravitates toward the earth, and the earth reciprocally toward the moon." The poet who walks by moonlight is conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence. I will endeavour to separate the tide in my thoughts from the current distractions of the day. I would warn my hearers that they must not try my thoughts by a daylight standard, but endeavour to realize that I speak out of the night. All depends on your point of view. In Drake's "Collections of Voyages," Wafer says of some Albinos among the Indians of Darien-"They are quite white, but their whiteness is like that of a horse, quite different from the fair or pale European, as they have not the least tincture of a blush or sanguine complexion. . . . Their eyebrows are milk-white, as is likewise the hair of their heads, which is very fine. . . . . They seldom go abroad in the daytime, the sun being disagreeable to them, and causing their eyes, which are weak and poring, to water, especially if it shines towards them; yet they see very well by moonlight, from which we call them mooneyed."

Neither in our thoughts in these moonlight walks, methinks, is there "the least tincture of a blush or sanguine complexion," but we are intellectually and morally Albinos-children of Endymion-such is the effect of conversing much with the moon.

I complain of Arctic voyagers that they do not enough remind us of the constant peculiar dreariness of the scenery, and the perpetual twilight of the Arctic night. So he whose theme is moonlight, though he may find it difficult, must, as it were, illustrate it with the light of

the moon alone.

Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a very different season. Take a July night, for instance. About ten o'clock, when man is

asleep, and day is fairly forgotten, the beauty of moonlight is seen over lonely pastures where cattle are silently feeding. On all sides novelties present themselves. Instead of the sun, there are the moon and stars; instead of the wood-thrush, there is the nightingale; instead of butterflies in the meadows, glowworms, insects, sparks of fire! Who would have believed it? What kind of cool, deliberate life dwells in those dewy abodes associated with a spark of fire? So man has fire in his eyes, or blood, or brain. Instead of singing-birds, the short chirp of the grasshopperlark, the hooting of owls, and the shrill note of the cricket, but above all the deep croaking of the pond-frogs by stream and pool. The tall rye stands upright, the corn grows apace, the bushes loom, the grain-fields seem.boundless. On the reed-shores, by the river's sides, the tall reeds occupy the ground like an army, their heads nodding in the breeze. Small trees and shrubs are seen in the midst, overwhelmed as by an inundation. The shadows of rocks and trees and shrubs and hills are more conspicuous than the objects themselves. The slightest irregularities in the ground are revealed by the shadows, and what the feet find comparatively smooth appears rough and diversified in consequence. For the same reason the whole landscape is more variegated and picturesque than by day. The smallest recesses in the rocks are dim and cavernous; the ferns in the woods appear of tropical size. The broom and wood-sage in over-grown wood-paths wet you with dew up to your middle. The leaves of the shrub-oak are shining as if a liquid were flowing over them. The pools seen through the trees are as full of light as the sky. "The light of the day takes refuge in their bosoms," as the Purana says of the ocean. All white objects are more remarkable than by day. A distant cliff looks like a phosphorescent space on a hill-side. The woods are heavy and dark. Nature slumbers. You see the moonlight reflected from the boles of particular trees in the recesses of the woods, as if she selected what to shine on. These small fractions of her light remind one of the plant called moon-seed-as if the moon were sowing it in such places.

In the night the eyes are partly closed, or retire into the head. Other senses take the lead. The walker is guided as well by the sense of smell. Every plant and field and forest emits its odour now-spire in the meadow, and tansy in the road; and there is the peculiar cent of HerbRobert, which has begun to show its needles. The senses both of hearing and smelling are more alert. We hear the tinkling of rills which we never detected before. From time to time, high up on the sides of hills, you pass through a stratum of warm air-a blast which has come up from the sultry level at noon. It tells of the day, of sunny noontide hours, and of the labourer wiping his brow and the bee humming amid blossom. It is an air in which work has been done-which men have breathed. It circulates about from woodside to billside, like a dog that has lost its master, now

that the sun is gone. The rocks retain all night the warmth of the sun which they have absorbed. And so does the sand: if you dig a few inches into it, you find a warm bed.

You lie on your back on a rock, in a pasture on the top of some bare hill at midnight, and speculate on the height of the starry canopy. The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show. A companion with whom I was sailing, one very windy, but bright moonlight night, when the stars were few and faint, thought that a man could get along with them, though he was considerably reduced in his circumstances-that they were a kind of bread and cheese that never failed. No wonder that there have been astrologers-that some have conceived that they were personally related to particular stars. Bartas, as translated by Sylvester, says he'll

"Not believe that the great Architect With all these fires the heavenly arches decked Only for show, and with these glistering shields, Tawake poor shepherds, watching in the fields,”

he'll

Du

"not believe that the least flower which pranks
Our garden-borders or our common banks,
And the least stone that in her warming lap
Our Mother Earth doth covetously wrap,
Hath some peculiar virtue of its own,
And that the glorious stars of heaven have none."

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And Sir Walter Raleigh well says, "The stars are instruments of far greater use than to give an obscure light, and for men to gaze on after sunset;" and he quotes Plotinus as affirming that they are significant, but not efficient;" and also Augustine as saying, "Deus regit inferiora corpora per superiora :" God rules the bodies below by those above. But best of all is this, which another writer has expressed: "Sapiens adjuvabit opus astrorum quemadmodum agricola terræ naturam"; A wise man assisteth the work of the stars as the husbandman helpeth the nature of the soil.

It does not concern men who are asleep in their beds, but it is very important to the traveller, whether the moon shines brightly or is obscured. It is not easy to realize the serene joy of all the earth, when she commences to shine unobstructedly, unless you have often been abroad alone in moonlight nights. She seems to be waging continual war with the clouds in your behalf. Yet we fancy the clouds to be her foes also. She comes on magnifying her dangers by her light, revealing, displaying them in all their hugeness and blackness, then suddenly casts them behind into the light concealed, and goes her way triumphant through a small space of clear sky.

In short, the moon traversing, or appearing to traverse, the small clouds which lie in her way, now obscured by them, now easily dissipating and shining through them, makes the drama of the moonlight night to all watchers and night-travellers. Sailors speak of it as the moon eating up the clouds. The traveller all

alone, the moon all alone, except for his sympa thy, overcoming with incessant victory whole squadrons of clouds above the woods and lakes and hills. When she is obscured, he so sympathizes with her that he could whip a dog for her relief, as Indians do. When she enters on a clear field of great extent in the heavens, and shines unobstructedly, he is glad. And when she has fought her way through all the squadrons of her foes, and rides majestic in a clear sky unscathed, and there are no more any obstructions in her path, he cheerfully and confidently pursues his way, and rejoices in his heart, and the cricket also seems to express joy in its song. How insupportable would be the days, if the night, with its dews and darkness, did not come to restore the drooping world! As the shades begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of those silent and brooding thoughts which are the natural prey of the intellect.

Richter says that "the earth is every day overspread with the veil of night for the same reason as the cages of birds are darkened, namely, that we may the more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought in the hush and quiet of darkness. Thoughts which day turns into smoke and mist stand about us in the night as light and flames; even as the column which fluctuates above the crater of Vesuvius in the daytime appears a pillar of cloud, but by night a pillar of fire."

There are nights in this climate of such serene and majestic beauty, so medicinal and fertilizing to the spirit, that methinks a sensitive nature would not devote them to oblivion, and perhaps there is no man but would be better and wiser for spending them out-of-doors, though he should sleep all the next day to pay for it, should sleep an Endymion sleep, as the ancients expressed it-nights which warrant the Grecian epithet ambrosial, when, as in the land of Beulah, the atmosphere is charged with dewy fragrance, and with music, and we take our repose and have our dreams awake; when the moon, not secondary to the sun,

"gives us his blaze again,

Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day.
Now through the passing cloud she seems to stoop,
Now up the pure cerulean rides sublime."

Diana still hunts in the English sky.

"In heaven queen she is among the spheres; She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure: Eternity in her oft change she bears:

She Beauty is; by her the fair endure.

"Time wears her not; she doth his chariot guide; Mortality below her orb is placed :

By her the virtues of the stars down slide;
By her is Virtue's perfect image cas,t"

The Hindoos compare the moon to a saintly being who has reached the last stage of bodily existence.

Great restorer of antiquity, great enchanter! In a mild night, when the harvest or hunter's moon shines unobstructedly, the houses in our village, whatever architect they may have had by day, acknowledge only a master. The village street is then as wild as a forest. New and old things are confounded. I know not whether I am sitting on the ruins of a wall, or on the material which is to compose a new one. Nature is an instructed and impartial teacher, spreading no crude opinions, and flattering none! she will be neither radical nor conservative. Consider the moonlight, so civil, yet so savage!

The light is more proportionate to our knowledge than that of day. It is no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind's habitual atmosphere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminated moments are.

"In such a night let me abroad remain

Till morning breaks, and all's confused again."

Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?-to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.

When Ossian, in his address to the sun, exclaims

"Where has darkness its dwelling?

Where is the cavernous home of the stars,
When thou quickly followest their steps,
Pursuing them like a hunter in the sky-
Thou climbing the lofty hills,

They descending on barren mountains ?"

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The

OLD AGE, when it has been attained in the paths of wisdom and virtue, claims universal honour and respect; since the old, in goodness and piety, are marked by having stood the great trial of human lifeyears assailed by temptation, yet passed in virtue. young may promise fairly and hope fairly, but the old are sanctified by practice; and none but the ignorant or the vicious can despise that time of life which God himself has marked with peculiar favour; since honoured age is often declared by his holy prophets to be the temporal reward of the pious and the just. The wise will ever reverence age, the fool alone will despise it.

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COCK CRO W.

'Meteorologists observe that during the still | In two lines ascribed to Drayton :

dark weather which usually happens about the Brumal Solstice, cocks often crow all day and all night: hence the belief that they crow all night on the vigil of the Nativity.

"There is this remarkable circumstance about the crowing of cocks: they seem to keep nightwatches, or to have general crowing matches at certain periods, as-soon after twelve, at two, and again at daybreak. These are the Alectrophones mentioned by St. John. To us these cockcrowings do not appear quite so regular in their times of occurrence, though they observe certain periods, when not interrupted by changes of the weather, which generally produce a great deal of crowing; indeed, the song of all birds is much influenced by the state of the air.

"It seems that crepusculum, or twilight, is the sort of light during which cocks crow most. This has been observed during the darkness of eclipses of the sun, as in that of September 4th,

1820.

"It was long ago believed among the common people that at the time of cockcrowing the midnight spirits forsook these lower regions, and went to their proper places. This notion is ancient; for Prudentius, the Christian poet of the fourth century, has a hymn, the opening of

which is thus translated:

"They say the wandering powers that love
The silent darkness of the night,
At cockcrowing give o'er to rove,

very

And all in fear do take their flight." This idea is illustrated by Shakspeare in " Hamlet," where the ghost was "about to speak, when the cock crew;" and "faded at the crowing of the cock." By a passage in "Macbeth," we were carousing till the second cock," it appears that there were two separate times of cockcrowing; and in "King Lear" we have, "he begins at curfew, and walks till the first cock." And in "Romeo and Juliet,"

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"And now the cocke, the morning's trumpeter, Play'd Hunts up for the Day-Star to appear.' Butler, in "Hudibras" (part iii. canto 1), has: "The cock crows, and the morn draws on, When 'tis decreed I must begone." And in Blair's "Grave," the apparition evanishes at the crowing of the cock.

"Tusser gives the order of crowing, in his "Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie," as follows:

"Cocke croweth at midnight, times few above six, With pause to his neighbour to answer betwix: At three aclocke thicker, and then, as ye knowe, Like all into mattens neere day they doe crowe: At midnight, at three, and an hour yer day, They utter their language as well as they may." Or, who can forget the allusion in Milton's "Comus," where the two brothers, benighted in the forest, implore that they may but hear the village cock "count the night-watches to his feathery dames ?"

"Bourne thus illustrates the sacredness and solemnity of the periods of crowing: "It was about the time of cockcrowing when our Saviour was born. The angels sung the first Christmas carol to the poor shepherds in the fields of Bethlehem. Now it may be presumed, as the Saviour of the world was then born, and the heavenly host had then descended to proclaim the news, that the angels of darkness would be terrified and confounded, and immediately fly away; and perhaps this consideration has partly been the foundation of this opinion. It was, too, about this time when our Saviour rose from the dead. A third reason is, the passage in the Book of Genesis, where Jacob wrestled with the angel for a blessing; where the angel says unto him, 'Let me go, for the day breaketh."" Bourne likewise attaches much importance to "the circumstances of the time of cockcrowing, being so natural a figure and representation of the morning of the resurrection; the night as shadowing out the night of the grave; the third watch being, as some suppose, the time our Saviour will come to judgment at; the noise of the cock awakening sleepy man, and telling him, as it were, the night is far spent, and the day is at hand, representing so naturally the voice of the archangel awakening the dead, and calling up the righteous to everlasting day. So naturally does the time of cockcrowing shadow out these things, that probably some good, well-meaning men might have been brought to believe that the very devils themselves, when the cock crew and reminded them of them, did fear and tremble, and shun the light."

"In the Great or Passion Week, as kept in

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MY DEAR C.-, Thank God the cholera panic is over, and the Parisians begin to venture home to their winter quarters-although they say that the hospitals are still full of fever, small-pox, and other complaints that usually follow the epidemic. We certainly have proved ourselves great cowards on the occasion, and yet what an example their Majesties set us, visiting all the hospitals in the very height of the distemper! It was really admirable, and justly excited great admiration from all parties, particularly with regard to the Empress, who was suffering under a very severe cold, therefore more exposed to take the disease. Accompanied by Mdlle. Bouvet, her young and pretty "lectrice," and the Marquis de Lagrange, she spent an hour at least at each hospital, talking to the sisters of charity, and to the doctors; and, approaching the beds of the sick, she questioned them, consoled them, and cheered them up with the greatest kindness, both women and men. One poor creature, whose sight was dimmed-perhaps by approaching death-mistaking her Majesty for the sister, answered to a question she put him with "Oui, ma sœur." "It is not I who speak to you," said the good sister, "but the Empress.' "Do not correct him," quickly interrupted the august lady; "that is the most beautiful name he can give me." Was it not a graceful and well-deserved compliment to these devoted nurses? You may imagine how our excitable populace, waiting outside, expressed their enthusiasm when her Majesty returned to her carriage. It was truly a noble step on her part, and certainly did a great deal of good, by restoring confidence to many whom fear had put in danger of death: and it was all done so quietly, without any parade; one felt that it was from kindness of heart. The Emperor went to the Hotel-Dieu incognito, accompanied only by one gentleman: he arrived after four o'clock, when the doors were closed to the public, and the members of the administration gone home. Not being

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known to the concièrge (doorkeeper) he was refused admittance. Fancy this important personage's dismay when he was told who the visitor was! Oh dear, dear! he could not open the door half wide enough to prove his horror at having confounded the Emperor with a simple citizen! His Majesty smilingly reassured him as he received his profound excuses, and passed into the sick wards. As soon as it was known that the Emperor was there, the cries of "Vive l'Empereur" came from every bed: and those who could scarcely move managed to lift their heads to get a glance. "Oh," said Napoleon, smiling, to a doctor near him, "I see they are better as they find their voices!" Hundreds of people had assembled round the doors of the hospital when the news spread that the Emperor was there; and you may imagine what shouts greeted him as soon as he appeared. He and the Empress sent 25,000 francs from their private purses to the families that the cholera has deprived of support. The court left_St. Cloud on the 12th for Compiègne. A few days before going, the young artists who had carried off the grand prizes at the School of Fine Arts were invited to dine at the imperial table. Unfortunately for many the notice given was too short, and only two or three could enjoy the honour. Her Majesty's féte, St. Eugenie, was celebrated the day after their arrival at their autumnal residence. Many an ambitious little heart is now going pit-a-pat with fond hopes to be invited to Compiègne, it being the ne plus ultra of joy and delight to get one's nose in there. No invitation at the Tuileries can equal Compiègne. Her Majesty orders the invitations personally, which gives a character of intimacy that all are proud of. There are always at every season several artists and authors amongst the number of the elect, though it must be very galling to the wives of these gentlemen to be excluded from Paradise. As a man and his wife are one, the law ought to be that where one is invited so is the other. The King and Queen of Portugal are expected on the 4th

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