To-night, looking at the Hyades, dimmed in a vaporous haze foretelling coming storm, as yet afar off, I find myself, I know not why, and in a despondency come I know not whence, thinking of and repeating words I read to-day in a translation of the Bhagavad Gita:—‘I am in the hearts of all. Memory and Knowledge, and the loss of both, are all from Me. There are two entities in this world, the Perishable and the Imperishable. All creatures are the Perishable and the unconcerned One is the Imperishable.’
The unconcerned One!
WINTER STARS
I
To know in a new and acute way the spell of the nocturnal skies, it is not necessary to go into the everlasting wonder and fascination of darkness with an astronomer, or with one whose knowledge of the stars can be expressed with scholarly exactitude. For the student it is needful to know, for example, that the Hyades are Alpha, Delta, Eeta, etc., of Tauri, and lie 10° south-east of the Pleiades. But as one sits before the fireglow, with one’s book in hand to suggest or one’s memory to remind, it is in another way as delightful and as fascinating to repeat again to oneself how Tennyson in Ulysses speaks of this stellar cluster as
“Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades vext the dim sea....”
or how Christopher Marlowe wrote of them
“As when the seaman sees the Hyades
Gather an army of Cimmerian clouds,
Auster and Aquilon with wingëd steeds....”
to recall how Spenser alludes to them as ‘the Moist Daughters,’ or how our Anglo-Saxon ancestors called them ‘the Boar-Throng.’ One must know that Alpha of Boötes is the astronomical signature of the greater Arcturus, but how much it adds to the charm of this star’s interest for us to learn that among its popular names are the Herdsman, the Bear-Watcher, the Driver of the Wain, and to know why these now familiar names were given and by whom. One may grasp the significance of the acquired knowledge that this vast constellation of Boötes stretches from the constellation of Draco to that of Virgo, and the numeration of its degrees in declination and ascension, and (if one may thus choose between the 85 and the 140 of astronomers) that it contains a hundred stars visible to the naked eye. But, for some of us at least, there is something as memorable, something as revealing, in a line such as that of the Persian poet Hafiz, as paraphased by Emerson,
“Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening his spear”—
or that superb utterance of Carlyle in Sartor Resartus,