With the first sustained breath of frost the beauty of the Galaxy becomes the chief glory of the nocturnal skies. But in midsummer even what amplitude of space, what infinite depths it reveals, and how mysterious that filmy stardrift blown like a streaming banner from behind the incalculable brows of an unresting Lord of Space, one of those Sons of the Invisible, as an oriental poet has it, whose ceaseless rush through eternity leaves but this thin and often scarce visible dust, ‘delicate as the tost veil of a dancing girl swaying against the wind.’ Perhaps no one of our poets, and poetry ancient and modern and of every country and race is full of allusions to the Galaxy, has more happily imaged it in a single line than Longfellow has done in
“Torrent of light and river of the air.”
As a river, or as a winding serpent, or as a stellar road, it has imaginatively been conceived by almost every people, though many races have delighted in the bestowal of a specific name, as though it were not an aggregation of star-clusters and nebulæ, but a marvellous creature of the heavens, as, perhaps, we may conceive the Great Bear, or Orion, or moons-beset Jupiter, or Saturn among his mysterious rings. Thus in the Book of Job it is called the Crooked Serpent; the Hindûs of Northern India call it the Dove of Paradise (Swarga Duari), though they have or had a still finer name signifying the Court of God; and the Polynesians give it the strange but characteristic designation, ‘The Long, Blue, Cloud-Eating Shark.’
Last night I watched the immense tract for a long time. There was frost in the air, for I saw that singular pulsation which rightly or wrongly is commonly held to be an optical illusion, the aspect as of a pulse, or of an undulating motion of life such as one might dimly perceive in the still respiration of some sleeping saurian. There appeared to be countless small stars, and in the darker spaces the pale vaporous drift became like the trail of phosphorescence in the wake of a vessel: at times it seemed almost solid, a road paven with diamonds and the dust of precious stones, with flakes as of the fallen plumage of wings—truly Arianrod, the Silver Road, as the Celts of old called it. Of course it was no more than a fantasy of the dreaming imagination, but it seemed to me more than once that as a vast indefinite sigh came from the windless but nevertheless troubled sea there was a corresponding motion in that white mysterious Milky Way, so infinitely remote. It was as though the Great Snake—as so many bygone peoples called and as many submerged races still call the Galaxy—lay watching from its eternal lair that other Serpent of Ocean which girdles the rolling orb of our onward-rushing Earth: and breathed in slow mysterious response: and, mayhap, sighed also into the unscanned void a sigh infinitely more vast, a sigh that would reach remote planets and fade along the gulfs of incalculable shores.
As winter comes, the Milky Way takes on a new significance for pastoral and other lonely peoples, for shepherds and fisher-folk above all. Songs and poems and legends make it familiar to everyone. A hundred tales own it as a mysterious background, as Brocéliande is the background of a hundred Breton ballads, or as Avalon is the background of a hundred romances of the Cymric and Gaelic Celt. The Hebridean islanders seldom look at it on still frosty nights without in the long idle hours recalling some old name or allusion, some ancient rann or oran, some duan or iorram of a later day, related to the mystery and startling appealing beauty of the Silver Road. It has many names on the lips of these simple men, who have little learning beyond the Bible and what life on the waters and life in the hearts of other simple men and women have taught them. Sometimes these names are beautiful, as ‘Dust of the World’ (or universe, an domhain) or the ‘Kyle of the Angels’ (the Strait or Sound): sometimes apt and natural, as ‘the Herring Way,’ and ‘the Wake’: sometimes legendary, as ‘the Road of the Kings’ (the old gods, from Fionn back to the Tuatha Dedannan) or as ‘the Pathway of the Secret People’: sometimes sombre or grotesque, as ‘The Shroud’ or as ‘the Bag of the Great Miller.’
There is especial interest for us, of course, in the legendary associations of the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian and Celtic or Gaelic peoples. These, in common with the majority of western nations, image the Milky Way more as a ‘road’ or ‘street’ than as a serpent or than as a river—though the Norse have their Midhgardhsormr, connected in association with the Weltum-Spanner (‘Stretcher-round-the-World’) or Ocean-Stream.
I do not know when the Milky Way as a designation first came into common English use. Possibly there is no prior mention to that in Chaucer’s Hous of Fame:
“Se yonder, lo, the Galaxyë,
Which men clepeth the Milky Wey”
—an allusion which certainly points to already familiar usage. It is now, I fancy, almost universal. Perhaps the old translator Eden was among the first to popularise it, with his rendering of the Latin Via Lactis and Via Lactea as ‘the Mylke way’ and ‘Mylke whyte way.’ There has been no need to derive the term from the Italian Via lattea or the French Voie lactée, since Eden’s use and Chaucer’s preceded that of any French poet or romanticist. Certainly the phrase became part of our literature after it passed golden from the mint of Milton (paraphrasing Ovid)—
“Broad and ample road whose dust is gold,
And pavement stars, as stars to thee appear
Seen in the Galaxy, that milky way
Which nightly as a circling zone thou seest
Powdered with stars....”