Sky, Stars and Universe

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.

At whose sight all the stars Hide their diminish’d heads. 6

And fast by hanging in a golden chain, This pendent world, in bigness as a star Of smallest magnitude close by the moon.

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

And the gilded car of day, His glowing axle doth allay In the steep Atlantic stream.

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

Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot Which men call earth.

Before the starry threshold of Jove’s Court My mansion is.

And looks commercing with the skies, Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky.

Hark! hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings, And Phoebus ’gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chalic’d flowers that lies; And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes: With everything that pretty is, My lady sweet, arise.

Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish; A vapor sometime like a bear or lion, A tower’d citadel, a pendant rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon ’t.

It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions.

These blessed candles of the night.

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.

For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars invisible by day.

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

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.

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.

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.

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

Complete people gaze into the blue sky above, plunge into the center of the earth below, and run freely in the eight directions without even a change of mood.

Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.