I see it all now:  when I wanted a king,
      ’Twas the kingship that failed in myself I was seeking,—­
    ’Tis so much less easy to do than to sing,
      So much simpler to reign by a proxy than be king! 
    Yes, I think I do see:  after all’s said and sung,
      Take this one rule of life and you never will rue it,—­
    ’Tis but do your own duty and hold your own tongue,
      And Blondel were royal himself, if he knew it!

* * * * *

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, 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 its 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 concerns 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 teachings, 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, criticizing 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