hear the tinkling of rills which
we never detected before. From time to time, high up on the sides of
hills, you pass through a stratum of warm air: a blast which has come up
from the sultry plains of noon. It tells of the day, of sunny noon-tide
hours and banks, of the laborer wiping his brow and the bee humming amid
flowers. It is an air in which work has been done,--which men have
breathed. It circulates about from wood-side to hill-side, like a dog
that has lost its master, now that the sun is gone. The rocks retain all
night the warmth of the sun which they have absorbed. And so does the
sand: if you dig a few inches into it, you find a warm bed.

You lie on your back on a rock in a pasture on the top of some bare hill
at midnight, and speculate on the height of the starry canopy. The stars
are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day
has to show. A companion with whom I was sailing, one very windy, but
bright moonlight night, when the stars were few and faint, thought that
a man could get along with _them_, though he was considerably reduced in
his circumstances,--that they were a kind of bread and cheese that never
failed.

No wonder that there have been astrologers,--that some have conceived
that they were personally related to particular stars. Du Bartas, as
translated by Sylvester, says he'll

"not believe that the Great Architect
With all these fires the heavenly arches decked
Only for shew, and with these glistering shields,
'T awake poor shepherds, watching in the fields,"--

he'll

"not believe that the least flower which pranks
Our garden-borders or our common banks,
And the least stone that in her warming lap
Our Mother Earth doth covetously wrap,
Hath some peculiar virtue of its own,
And that the glorious stars of heaven have none."

And Sir Walter Raleigh well says, "The stars are instruments of far
greater use than to give an obscure light, and for men to gaze on after
sunset"; and he quotes Plotinus as affirming that they "are significant,
but not efficient"; and also Augustine as saying, "_Deus regit inferiora
corpora per superiora_": God rules the bodies below by those above. But
best of all is this, which another writer has expressed: "_Sapiens
adjuvabit opus astrorum quemadmodum agricola terrae naturam_": A wise man
assisteth the work of the stars as the husbandman helpeth the nature of
the soil.

It does not concer