" [5]
Nor does the beauty end with the day. "It is nothing to sleep under the
canopy of heaven, where we have the globe of the earth for our place of
repose, and the glories of the heavens for our spectacle?" [6] For my part
I always regret the custom of shutting up our rooms in the evening, as
though there was nothing worth seeing outside. What, however, can be more
beautiful than to "look how the floor of heaven is thick inlaid with
patines of bright gold," or to watch the moon journeying in calm and
silver glory through the night. And even if we do not feel that "the man
who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has been
present like an Archangel at the creation of light and of the world," [7]
still "the stars say something significant to all of us: and each man has
a whole hemisphere of them, if he will but look up, to counsel and
befriend him"; [8] for it is not so much, as Helps elsewhere observes, "in
guiding us over the seas of our little planet, but out of the dark waters
of our own perturbed minds, that we may make to ourselves the most of
their significance.
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