As a schoolboy’s paper kite.
Now if it was sailing high at noon it must have been, as seen from earth, nearly on a line with the sun—that is to say, but little more than “new”—that is to say, invisible in the daytime. But that is not the worst of this business. A new moon is not only invisible at noon, but sets soon after sunset, and would give but little light if it did not. Yet this unearthly observer after relating how night came on adds:
Then the moon, in all her pride,
Like a spirit glorified,
Filled and overflowed the night
With revelations of her light.
It is mournful to think that this popular poet lived out his long serene life without anybody suspecting his condition, nor offering him the comforts of an asylum.
I have found similar blunders in the poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Schiller, Moore, Shelley, Tennyson and Bayard Taylor. Of course a poet is entitled to any kind of universe that may best suit his purpose, and if he could give us better poetry by making the moon rise “full-orbed” in the northwest and set like a “tin sickle” in the zenith I should go in for letting him have his fling. But I do not discern any gain in “sweetness and light” from these despotic readjustments of the relations among sun, earth and moon, and must set it all down to the account of ignorance, which, in any degree and however excusable, is not a thing to be admired. Concerning nothing is it more general, more deep, more dark, more invincible, nor withal, more needless, than it is with regard to movements and visible aspects of our satellite. How one can have eyes and not know the pranks of the several heavenly bodies is possibly obvious to Omniscience, but a finite mind cannot rightly understand it.
We will suppose that our planet is without a satellite. The nights are brilliant or starless, as the clouds may determine, but in all the measureless reaches of space is no world having a visible disk, with vicissitudes of light and shadow. One day a famous man of science announces in the public prints a startling discovery. He has found an orb, smaller than the earth but of considerable magnitude, moving in such a direction and at such a rate of speed that at a stated time the next year it will have approached our sphere so closely as to be caught by its attractive power and held, a prisoner, wheeling round and round in a vain endeavor to escape. He goes on to explain that the invisible tether will be, astronomically speaking, but a stone’s throw in length: the captive world will have in fact the astonishing propinquity of only a quarter of a million miles! We shall be able to see, even with unassisted eyes, the very mountains and valleys upon its surface, while a glass of moderate power will show, not only these mountains (many times higher than those of our own orb) with perfect definition, their long black shadows projected upon the plains, but will reveal the details of extinct craters wide enough to engulf a terrestrial province, and how deep Heaven knows. Upon this strange new world, the great man goes on to say, we shall be able to observe the mutations of its day and night, tracing the lines of its dawn and sunset exactly as, if we were there, we could observe the more rapid changes upon the body of our own planet; and surely it would be worth something to stand away from our spinning orb and take in all its visible vicissitudes in one comprehensive view.
It is easy to see the effect of such an announcement, verified by the apparition of the orb at the calculated place and time. All the civilized nations would be in a ferment. The newspapers would be full of the subject. Journalism would be conducted by the astronomers and nothing but the coming orb would be talked of; many would go mad from excitement. And when the celestial monster, moving aimless through space, should swim into the earth’s attraction and go whirling in its new orbit how we should study it, attentive to its every visible aspect, alertly sensible to its changes and profoundly moved by the desolate sublimity of its stupendous scenery. For a half of every lunar month the churches, lyceums, theaters—all the places of instruction or amusement where people now assemble by artificial light would close at sunset and the whole population would take to the hills. Colleges, societies and clubs would be founded for the new knowledge; every human being, with opportunity and capacity, would become a specialist in selenography and selenology—a lunar expert, devoted to his science. Not to know all about the moon would be considered as discreditable as illiteracy is considered now. Well, the moon we have always with us, and not one man in a thousand nor one author in a hundred knows any more about it than that it is frequently invisible and commonly not round. On other subjects there is less ignorance: at least three in a thousand know that the stars are not the same as the planets, though two of the three are unable to say what is a planet and what is a star.