of the day, of sunny noon-tide hours and banks, of the laborer wiping his brow and the bee humming amid flowers.  It is an air in which work has been done,—­which men have breathed.  It circulates about from wood-side to hill-side, 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.  Du Bartas, as translated by Sylvester, says he’ll

         “not believe that the Great Architect
    With all these fires the heavenly arches decked
    Only for shew, and with these glistering shields,
    ’T awake poor shepherds, watching in the fields,”—­

he’ll

“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.”

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 terrae 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.