[Illustration: "YON CRESCENT MOON, A GOLDEN BOAT, HANGS DIM BEHIND THE
TREE, O!">[
Little children love the moon. I have seen a baby who could hardly speak, clasp her tiny hands and call out, "Have it! have it!" as she saw it glow like a lamp behind the trees; and we do not lose this love as we grow older.
When we remember that the sun is four hundred times farther away from us than the moon, it makes our earth's silent companion seem very near by comparison; but still you will not think the journey to the moon a short one, when I tell you that if you could travel through the fields of air, rushing along in a fast train, never stopping day or night, it would be eight months before you got to your journey's end. And when you did get there you would have arrived at a more desolate country than you ever dreamed of—a place much like what we might imagine our earth would have become if there were no water, no air (for if there is air, it is so thin that no creature like any we know could breathe it), no greenness or beauty, though there might be scenery grand in its awfulness.
Have you ever looked through a telescope at the moon? I have. Last summer I was staying at a seaside town, and one evening I noticed a crowd gathered on the sands. As I came nearer, I found that a man was showing the moon and planets through his telescope to any who wished to see what they could see. He was selling peeps through the telescope, which was a pretty good-sized one, at a penny a peep. Now, though I had read a great deal about the moon, and had seen in books photographs of what are called lunar landscapes, I had never once had a chance of looking at her face through anything but a bit of smoked glass, at the time of an eclipse.
So I paid my penny, and when my turn came I stood upon the stool and had my peep. I can only tell you that the moon did not look nearly so beautiful to me through the showman's little telescope as she did when my peep was over, and I saw her once more sailing through the deep blue of the sky, the queen of night indeed.
I had read that astronomers had found that the nearer their great telescopes brought them to the moon, the more like a barren rock she became, and when I had this nearer view of her than ever before, she looked to me just as she had been described, like "a burnt-out cinder."
You know the shadowy figure which you can see, sometimes more distinctly than at others, on the face of the moon (when I was a child I was told that it was "the man in the moon"!), this appearance is caused by deep valleys, or by the shadows of terrible mountain peaks, which were once volcanoes, throwing out smoke and lava. While I was looking through his telescope, the showman pointed out to me two of the highest of these peaks, and told me their names, that is the names which the astronomers had given them; for these rocky heights have been marked upon maps of the moon, just as the Welsh mountains are marked upon the map of England and Wales. Upon these maps we can find Mount Tycho, Mount Gassendi, Mount Copernicus—all of them extinct volcanoes—and the name of Apennines has been given to a vast mountain-chain; and the heights of all these mountain peaks have been ascertained by measuring the shadows cast by them. There are oceans and seas also marked upon these moon-maps, but they were named at a time when it was not yet known that they were great plains; for, as I told you, no trace of water, cloud, or even mist has been discovered there.
Are you sorry to hear that the moon which looks so lovely to our sight, is found by those who can get a nearer view to be such a weird and desolate place that it seemed as if only death reigned there? I know I was, when first I read about it, and saw a picture of the moon, and wondered at its bare mountain peaks, with their rugged craters and dreadful precipices, and its "Ocean of Storms" and "Lake of Death," as two of the sea-like plains have been called. I wondered how it could have become, as it were, like a dead earth; but this is one of the things which God has not told us about. What He has told us is that He made this "lesser light to rule the night," and as she moves over the sky in her calm silent beauty, she speaks to us of His goodness in giving not only the sun to rule by day, but the moon and stars to rule by night, those wonderful stars whose silent voice is ever making known His power, and telling of His glory; as the poet Addison has beautifully said—
"For ever singing as they shine,
The hand that made us is Divine!"
This is a long chapter, but we have been speaking of a vast subject, and before I close it, I want to refer to two wonderful things about the stars, to which God draws our attention in His word. He tells us that "one star differeth from another star in glory," and astronomers have discovered that there was a deeper truth than they at first imagined underlying these words.