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 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 endeavor 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 endeavor to realize that I speak out of the night.  All depends on your point of view.  In Drake’s “Collection 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 voyages 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.