Less know we of your interminable starry neighbors. Is Mars civil, or heavy Saturn capable of laughter? Hath a comet vexed you,—that tireless incendiary? Doth Leo roar too loudly on your sensitive ear? We fancy that the Dipper is replenished frequently in your Ladyship's court; that the Milky Way is pleasantest of your pastures; that the Scorpion guardeth your palace gateway; and that Aquarius, be he not delinquent, tendeth your flower-beds.
What scenes, Cosmopolite, Circumnavigator, Universalist, have you beheld! What joy, what plenty; what riot and desolation! You are the arch-spectator. Death sees not half so widely. He lurketh like an anxious thief in the crowd, seeking what he may take away. But your bland leisurely eye looketh down impartially on all.
Caravans rested a thousand years ago beneath you in the desert; Assyrian shepherds chanted to you with their long-hushed voices; the Euphrates, while the infant world fell into its first slumber, leaped up and played with you in Paradise. You have known the chaos before man, and yet we saw you laugh upon last April's rain. Are there none for whom you are lonely through the ages? Are there not centuries of old delight in your memory, unequalled now? faces fairer than the lilies, on whose repose you still yearn to shine? Do you miss the smoke of altars? Have you forgotten the beginners of the "star-ypointing pyramid"? Can you not tell us a tale of the Visigoth? How sang Blondel against the prison-door? How brawny was Bajazet? How fair was Helen; Semiramis how cruel? Moon! where be the treasures of the doughty Kidd?
Where, too, is the slow, mysterious evening of our childhood, or its dawn, anticipating change, as you turned away? Or, rather, where is the child that enjoyed them by your kindly ray,—retaining now, of all which was its identity, only the dense sleep, the illimitable dreams, of those intervening nights? Do you call to mind, you that saw them often, its after-supper frolics; its Hallow-e'en captures, despite tub and candle; its inopportune studies, stolen out of mere greediness to know,—a fever long subsided? You were kind to that something of yesterday, dead as Amenophis now. Gleam, in some recess of the south, to-night, on bright-eyed F., who answered its young jests, and journeyed with it over the icy river, arm-in-arm; and on B.G., austere yet gentle, who played Brutus once to its Cassius; and rise not, rise not too soon upon our Philippi!
You have been fed, O Cynthia! upon the homage of mortal lips: you have had praises from the poets exquisite as calamus and myrrh. Many a time have we rehearsed before you such as we recall, from the sigh of Enobarbus,—
"O sovereign mistress of true melancholy!"
to the hymnal
"Orbèd maiden! with white fire laden,"
or the noble salutation of a mirthful-mournful spirit over seas:—
"Oh! thou art beautiful, howe'er it be,
Huntress or Dian, or whatever named;
And he the veriest pagan, that first framed
His silver idol, and ne'er worshipped thee!"