."

There are nights in this climate of such serene and majestic beauty, so
medicinal and fertilizing to the spirit, that methinks a sensitive
nature would not devote them to oblivion, and perhaps there is no man
but would be better and wiser for spending them out of doors, though he
should sleep all the next day to pay for it, should sleep an Endymion
sleep, as the ancients expressed it,--nights which warrant the Grecian
epithet _ambrosial_, when, as in the land of Beulah, the atmosphere is
charged with dewy fragrance, and with music, and we take our repose and
have our dreams awake,--when the moon, not secondary to the sun,

"gives us his blaze again,
Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day.
Now through the passing cloud she seems to stoop,
Now up the pure cerulean rides sublime."

Diana still hunts in the New-England sky.

"In heaven queen she is among the spheres;
She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure;
Eternity in her oft change she bears;
She Beauty is; by her the fair endure.

"Time wears her not; she doth his chariot guide;
Mortality below her orb is placed;
By her the virtues of the stars down slide;
By her is Virtue's perfect image cast."

The Hindoos compare the moon to a saintly being who has reached the last
stage of bodily existence.

Great restorer of antiquity, great enchanter! In a mild night, when the
harvest or hunter's moon shines unobstructedly, the houses in our
village, whatever architect they may have had by day, acknowledge only a
master. The village street is then as wild as the forest. New and old
things are confounded. I know not whether I am sitting on the ruins of a
wall, or on the material which is to compose a new one. Nature is an
instructed and impartial teacher, spreading no crude opinions, and
flattering none; she will be neither radical nor conservative. Consider
the moonlight, so civil, yet so savage!

The light is more proportionate to our knowledge than that of day. It is
no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind's habitual atmosphere,
and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminated moments are.

"In such a night let me abroad remain
Till morning breaks, and all's confused again."

Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an
inward dawn?--to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the
morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely gari