“The spiders and bugs which swarm in my observing-houses I have rather an attachment for, but they must not crawl over my recording-paper.  Rats are my abhorrence, and I learned with pleasure that some poison had been placed under the transit-house.

“One gets attached (if the term may be used) to certain midnight apparitions.  The Aurora Borealis is always a pleasant companion; a meteor seems to come like a messenger from departed spirits; and the blossoming of trees in the moonlight becomes a sight looked for with pleasure.

“Aside from the study of astronomy, there is the same enjoyment in a night upon the housetop, with the stars, as in the midst of other grand scenery; there is the same subdued quiet and grateful seriousness; a calm to the troubled spirit, and a hope to the desponding.

“Even astronomers who are as well cared for as are those of Cambridge have their annoyances, and even men as skilled as they are make blunders.

“I have known one of the Bonds,[Footnote:  Of the Harvard College Observatory.] with great effort, turn that huge telescope down to the horizon to make an observation upon a blazing comet seen there, and when he had found it in his glass, find also that it was not a comet, but the nebula of Andromeda, a cluster of stars on which he had spent much time, and which he had made a special object of study.

“Dec. 26, 1854.  They were wonderful men, the early astronomers.  That was a great conception, which now seems to us so simple, that the earth turns upon its axis, and a still greater one that it revolves about the sun (to show this last was worth a man’s lifetime, and it really almost cost the life of Galileo).  Somehow we are ready to think that they had a wider field than we for speculation, that truth being all unknown it was easier to take the first step in its paths.  But is the region of truth limited?  Is it not infinite?...  We know a few things which were once hidden, and being known they seem easy; but there are the flashings of the Northern Lights—­’Across the lift they start and shift;’ there is the conical zodiacal beam seen so beautifully in the early evenings of spring and the early mornings of autumn; there are the startling comets, whose use is all unknown; there are the brightening and flickering variable stars, whose cause is all unknown; and the meteoric showers—­and for all of these the reasons are as clear as for the succession of day and night; they lie just beyond the daily mist of our minds, but our eyes have not yet pierced through it.”

CHAPTER III

1855-1857

EXTRACTS FROM DIARY—­RACHEL—­EMERSON—­A HARD WINTER