leurs couronnes de feu;
Et les flots bleus, que rien ne gouverne et n'arrete,
Disaient en recourbant l'ecume de leur crete:
... C'est le Seigneur, le Seigneur Dieu!

_Note: Free Translation_

I was alone on the waves, on a starry night,
Not a cloud in the sky, not a sail in sight,
My eyes pierced beyond the natural world...
And the woods, and the hills, and the voice of Nature
Seemed to question in a confused murmur,
The waves of the Sea, and Heaven's fires.

And the golden stars in infinite legion,
Sang loudly, and softly, in glad recognition,
Inclining their crowns of fire;...
And the waves that naught can check nor arrest
Sang, bowing the foam of their haughty crest...
Behold the Lord God--Jehovah!

The immortal poet of France was an astronomer. The author more than
once had the honor of conversing with him on the problems of the starry
sky--and reflected that astronomers might well be poets.

It is indeed difficult to resist a sense of profound emotion before the
abysses of infinite Space, when we behold the innumerable multitude of
worlds suspended above our heads. We feel in this solitary contemplation
of the Heavens that there is more in the Universe than tangible and
visible matter: that there are forces, laws, destinies. Our ants' brains
may know themselves microscopic, and yet recognize that there is
something greater than the Earth, the Heavens;--more absolute than the
Visible, the Invisible;--beyond the more or less vulgar affairs of life,
the sense of the True, the Good, the Beautiful. We feel that an immense
mystery broods over Nature,--over Being, over created things. And it is
here again that Astronomy surpasses all the other sciences, that it
becomes our sovereign teacher, that it is the _pharos_ of modern
philosophy.

O Night, mysterious, sublime, and infinite! withdrawing from our eyes
the veil spread above us by the light of day, giving back transparency
to the Heavens, showing us the prodigious reality, the shining casket of
the celestial diamonds, the innumerable stars that succeed each other
interminably in immeasurable space! Without Night we should know
nothing. Without it our eyes would never have divined the sidereal
population, our intellects would never have pierced the harmony of the
Heavens, and we should have remained t