Sky, Stars and Universe

Dark-heaving—boundless, endless, and sublime— The image of Eternity.

Out on the lawn I lie in bed,

The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be?--it is the same the angels breathe.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.

Since once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at her song, And certain stars shot madly from their spheres To hear the sea-maid’s music.

To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.

Was I deceiv’d or did a sable cloud Turn forth her silver lining on the night?

The spacious firmament on high, With all the blue ethereal sky, And spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their great Original proclaim.

The sun’s rim dips, the stars rush out: At one stride comes the dark; With far-heard whisper o’er the sea Off shot the specter bark.

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, This is the common air that bathes the globe.

The world stands out on either side No wider than the heart is wide; Above the world is stretched the sky,— No higher than the soul is high. The heart can push the sea and land Farther away on either hand; The soul can split the sky in two, And let the face of God shine through. But East and West will pinch the heart That can not keep them pushed apart; And he whose soul is flat—the sky Will cave in on him by and by.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.

Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes—I mean the universe … This book is written in mathematical language and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help … one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.

Who art thou then, O my soul!" (and here [Zarathustra] became frightened, for a sunbeam shot down from heaven upon his face.""O heaven above me," said he sighing, and sat upright, "thou gazest at me? Thou hearkenest unto my strange soul?When wilt thou drink this drop of dew that fell down upon all earthly things—when wilt thou drink this strange soul——When, thou well of eternity! thou joyous, awful, noontide abyss! when wilt thou drink my soul back into thee?

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

These my sky-robes, spun out of Iris’ woof.

The starry cope Of heaven.

The wakeful nightingale, She all night long her amorous descant sung; Silence was pleas’d: now glow’d the firmament With living sapphires: Hesperus, that led The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon, Rising in clouded majesty, at length Apparent queen unveil’d her peerless light, And o’er the dark her silver mantle threw.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.