I
To know in a new and acute way the spell of the nocturnal skies, it
is not necessary to go into the everlasting wonder and fascination of
darkness with an astronomer, or with one whose knowledge of the stars
can be expressed with scholarly exactitude. For the student it is
needful to know, for example, that the Hyades are Alpha, Delta, Eeta,
etc., of _Tauri_, and lie 10° south-east of the Pleiades. But as one
sits before the fireglow, with one’s book in hand to suggest or one’s
memory to remind, it is in another way as delightful and as fascinating
to repeat again to oneself how Tennyson in _Ulysses_ speaks of this
stellar cluster as
“Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades vext the dim sea....”
or how Christopher Marlowe wrote of them
“As when the seaman sees the Hyades
Gather an army of Cimmerian clouds,
Auster and Aquilon with wingëd steeds....”
to recall how Spenser alludes to them as ‘the Moist Daughters,’ or
how our Anglo-Saxon ancestors called them ‘the Boar-Throng.’ One
must know that Alpha of Boötes is the astronomical signature of the
greater Arcturus, but how much it adds to the charm of this star’s
interest for us to learn that among its popular names are the Herdsman,
the Bear-Watcher, the Driver of the Wain, and to know why these now
familiar names were given and by whom. One may grasp the significance
of the acquired knowledge that this vast constellation of Boötes
stretches from the constellation of Draco to that of Virgo, and the
numeration of its degrees in declination and ascension, and (if one may
thus choose between the 85 and the 140 of astronomers) that it contains
a hundred stars visible to the naked eye. But, for some of us at least,
there is something as memorable, something as revealing, in a line such
as that of the Persian poet Hafiz, as paraphased by Emerson,
“Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening his spear”--
or that superb utterance of Carlyle in _Sartor Resartus_,
“What thinks Boötes of them, as he leads his Hunting Dogs over the
zenith in their leash of sidereal fire?”
Not, I may add in parenthesis, that the seekers after astronomical
knowledge should depend on the poets and romancers for even an
untechnical accuracy. Literature, alas, is full of misstatements
concerning the moon and stars. Few poets are accurate as Milton is
magnificently accurate, his rare slips lying within the reach of a
knowledge achieved since his day: or as Tennyson is accurate. Carlyle
himself, quoted above in so beautiful a passage, has made more than one
strange mistake for (as he once aspired to be) a student astronomer:
not only, as in one instance, making the Great Bear for ever revolve
round Boötes, but, in a famous passage in his _French Revolution_,
speaking of Orion and the Pleiades glittering serenely over
revolutionary Paris on the night of 9th August 1792, whereas, as some
fact-loving astronomer soon pointed out, Orion did not on that occasion
rise till daybreak. It has been said of the Moon, in fiction, that
her crescents and risings and wanings are to most poets and novelists
apparently an inexplicable mystery, an unattainable knowledge. Even a
writer who was also a seaman and navigator, Captain Marryat, writes in
one of his novels of a waning crescent moon seen in the early evening.
The great Shakespeare himself wrote of the Pole Star as immutable, as
the one unpassing, the one fixt and undeviating star--
“... constant as the Northern Star,
Of whose true fixed and lasting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.”
This was, of course, ignorance of what has since been ascertained, and
not uninstructedness or mere hearsay. Possibly, too, he had in mind
rather that apparent unchanging aloofness from the drowning sea-horizon
to which Homer alludes in the line beautifully translated ‘Arctos,
sole star that never bathes in the ocean wave’ ... of which, no doubt,
our great poet had read in the quaint delightful words of Chaucer
(rendering Boetius)--‘Ne the sterre y-cleped “the Bere,” that enclyneth
his ravisshinge courses abouten the soverein heighte of the worlde, ne
the same sterre Ursa nis never-mo wasshen in the depe westrene see, ne
coveitith nat to deyen his flaumbe in the see of the occian, al-thogh
he see other sterres y-plounged in the see.’
That constellation ‘y-cleped the Bere,’ how profoundly it has impressed
the imagination of all peoples. In every age, in every country, our
kindred on lonely lands, on lonely seas, from caverns and camp-fires
and great towers, have watched it ‘incline its ravishing courses’ about
the Mountain of the North, ‘coveting not’ to drown its white fires in
the polar seas. Here, however, it is strange to note the universality
of the Ursine image with the Greeks and Romans and the nations of the
South, and the universality with the Teutonic peoples of designations
such as the Wain and the Plough. It was not till the Age of Learning
set in among the Northern peoples that the classic term came into
common use. Thus in a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon manual of astronomy
the writer, in adopting the Greek Arctos (still used occasionally
instead of the Bear), adds ‘which untaught men call Carleswæn,’ that
is Charles’s Wain, the Waggon. A puzzling problem is why a designation
which primarily arose from an association of the early Greeks
concerning Arkas, their imaginary racial ancestor, with Kallisto his
mother, who had been changed into a great bear in the heavens, should
also suggest itself to other peoples, to races so remote in all ways
as the North American Indians. Yet before the white man had visited
the tribes of North America the red men called the constellation by
names signifying a bear. The historian Bancroft has proved that alike
among the Algonquins of the Atlantic and of the Mississippi, among the
Eastern Narragansett nations and among the nations of the Illinois, the
Bear was the accepted token.
Boötes, the Great Bear, the Little Dipper or Ursa Minor, these great
constellations, with their splendid beacons Arcturus, the Triones or
the Seven Hounds of the North, and the Pole Star--
“By them, on the deep,
The Achaians gathered where to sail their ships”--
and in like fashion all the races of man since Time was have ‘gathered’
the confusing ways of night on all lonely seas and in all lonely lands.
But best of all, to know this spell of the nocturnal skies, one
should be in the company of fisher-folk or old seamen or shepherds,
perchance unlettered but wise in traditional lore and leal to the
wisdom of their fathers. How much more I value what I have heard
from some shepherd on the wide dark moors, or from some islesman in
a fishing-coble or drifting wherry, on moonless nights filled with a
skyey ‘phosphorescence’ as radiant as that a-dance and a-gleam in the
long seethe of the wake of a ship, than what I have found concerning
scientific star-names in books of astronomy. Nothing that I have
since learned of ‘the Pointers’ has impressed me so much as what I
learned as a child of ‘the Hounds of Angus,’ nor, in later and fuller
knowledge of Polaris, has the child’s first knowledge of the mystery
and wonder of ‘the Star of Wisdom,’ as pointed out and tale-told by an
old Hebridean fisherman, or of ‘the House of Dreams,’ as sung to me in
a forgotten ballad by a Gaelic woman of Argyll, been surpassed.
It was they--herdsmen and mariners, the wayfarer, the nomad, the
desert-wanderer--who, of old, gave these names to which the nations
have grown used. It was with the nomad that astronomy began. The
Chaldæan shepherd, the Phœnician mariner, studied the stars and named
them and the great constellations which group themselves from horizon
to horizon in the nocturnal skies. They perceived strange symmetries,
symbolic images, grotesque resemblances. The same instinct made the
Arab of the Desert call the Pleiades the Herd of Camels, made the
Akkadian call them the Wild Doves, made the Celtic hunter call them
the Pack of Hounds, made the Teuton peasant call them the Hen and
Chickens, made the Australian savage call them (in conjunction with
the Bear) Young Girls playing to Young Men dancing: the same instinct,
this, as made the ancient poet of the Zend-Avesta call them the Seven
Beneficent Spirits, or made the modern poet of _Locksley Hall_ liken
them to a swarm of fireflies, or made the Gaelic poet of to-day image
them as the Herring-Net. In a word, the instinct of poetry: which is as
deep as hunger and thirst, as deep as love, as deep as fear, as deep
as the desire of life. The instinct of the imagination to clothe the
mysterious and the inexplicable in the raiment of the familiar or of
recognisable and intimate symbol.
How infinitely it adds to the beauty of star-names such as Aldebaran,
Alcyone, Polaris, to know that to the swarthy nomads of the desert
it imaged itself as one following in a skyey desert, a camel-driver
tracking lost camels, a hound following a quarry, a warrior following a
foe, a holy pilgrim tracking the difficult ways of God, so that no name
seemed to them so apt as _Al Dabarān_, the Follower: or to know that
to the pastoral Akkadians or the early tillers and hunters of sea-set
Greece, looking at the Pleiades in winter, Alcyone in its lovely group
suggested the Nest of the Halcyon, the summer-bird who had flown to
the remote depths of the sky to sit and brood there on a windless
wave-unreached nest till once again ‘the Halcyon days’ of calm settled
on land and sea: or to know that to our own seafaring folk of old, the
men who voyaged perilously in small and frail craft without compass and
with little knowledge of the mysterious laws of the mysterious forces
of earth and sea and heaven, Polaris was the one unchanging skyey
beacon, the steadfast unswerving North Star; and, so, lovingly called
by our old Saxon forbears the _Scipsteorra_, the Ship-Star, and by the
Elizabethan seafarers the Lodestar or Pilot-Star, and by the Hebridean
fishermen the Home-Star, and by others the Star of the Sea.
“Constellations come, and climb the heavens, and go.
Star of the Pole! and thou dost see them set.
Alone in thy cold skies,
Thou keep’st thy old unmoving station yet
Nor join’st the dances of that glittering train,
Nor dipp’st thy virgin orb in the blue western main.
On thy unaltering blaze
The half-wrecked mariner, his compass lost,
Fixes his steady gaze,
And steers, undoubting, to the friendly coast;
And they who stray in perilous wastes by night
Are glad when thou dost shine to guide their footsteps right.”
The same spirit which animated Bryant when he wrote these verses in
his beautiful ‘Hymn to the North Star,’ or made one of the Gaelic
island-poets allude to it as the Star of Compassion, prevailed with
these Chaldæan shepherds and Arabian nomads of old. They gave the
familiar or beautiful names of love or intimate life, and in exchange
the taciturn face of heaven lost its terrifying menace of silence,
and the Night became a comrade, became the voice of the poets, of the
sages, of the prophets and seers, the silver gateways of the Unknown.
The Hunter, the Herdsman, the Bear-Watcher, the Driver of the Wain--how
much more we love Boötes, or, as Chaucer called the constellation, ‘ye
sterres of Arctour,’ because of these simple names. The Herdsman, the
Hunter, ... the words strike the primitive music. The youth of the
world is in them. In these few letters what infinite perspectives, what
countless images. The Golden Age lies hid in their now impenetrable
thickets. Through their branches we may look at the tireless hunter
of to-day on the interminable pampas, at the bowed trailer in the dim
savannahs of the Amazon, at the swarthy nomad on the wastes of Sahara
guarding his camels like ships becalmed in a vast sea of sand, or may
see the solitary mountain-shepherd in the hill-wildernesses of Spain or
Italy, or the Northern herdsman toiling against wind and snow on our
Gaelic hills.
Here also is the romance of the stars, as well as that deeper and
perturbing romance which is disclosed to us in the revelations of
science. That sense of incalculable distances, of immeasurable periods,
of unknown destinies and amazing arrivals, which haunts the imagination
of the astronomer when he looks beyond the frontiers of ascertained
knowledge, half-doubting perhaps whether even that be not a terrible
illusory logic, is also here. One goes back, as in thought one recedes
into the beautiful, impassioned wonderland of childhood. One seems to
see mankind itself as a child, gone but a little way even yet, looking
up trustfully or fearfully to the mysterious mother-eyes of a Face it
cannot rightly discern, in its breath being Immortality, Eternity in
its glance, and on its brows Infinitude.