It is no small thing--no light discovery--to find a river Andromeda and
Arcturus and their bright neighbours wheeling for half a summer night
around a pole-star in the waters. One star or two--delicate visitants of
streams--we are used to see, somewhat by a sleight of the eyes, so fine
and so fleeting is that apparition. Or the southern waves may show the
light--not the image--of the evening or the morning planet. But this, in
a pool of the country Thames at night, is no ripple-lengthened light; it
is the startling image of a whole large constellation burning in the
flood.
These reflected heavens are different heavens. On a darker and more
vacant field than that of the real skies, the shape of the Lyre or the
Bear has an altogether new and noble solitude; and the waters play a
painter's part in setting their splendid subject free. Two movements
shake but do not scatter the still night: the bright flashing of
constellations in the deep Weir-pool, and the dark flashes of the vague
bats flying. The stars in the stream fluctuate with an alien motion.
Reversed, estranged, isolated, every shape of large stars escapes and
returns, escapes and returns. Fitful in the steady night, those
constellations, so few, so whole, and so remote, have a suddenness of
gleaming life. You imagine that some unexampled gale might make them
seem to shine with such a movement in the veritable sky; yet nothing but
deep water, seeming still in its incessant flight and rebound, could
really show such altered stars. The flood lets a constellation fly, as
Juliet's "wanton" with a tethered bird, only to pluck it home again. At
moments some rhythmic flux of the water seems about to leave the darkly-
set, widely-spaced Bear absolutely at large, to dismiss the great stars,
and refuse to imitate the skies, and all the water is obscure; then one
broken star returns, then fragments of another, and a third and a fourth
flit back to their noble places, brilliantly vague, wonderfully visible,
mobile, and unalterable. There is nothing else at once so keen and so
elusive.
The aspen poplar had been in captive flight all day, but with no such
vanishings as these. The dimmer constellations of the soft night are
reserved by the skies. Hardly is a secondary star seen by the large and
vague eyes of the stream. They are blind to the Pleiades.
There is a little kind of star that drowns itself by hundreds in the
river Thames--the many-rayed silver-white seed that makes journeys on all
the winds up and down England and across it in the end of summer. It is
a most expert traveller, turning a little wheel a-tiptoe wherever the
wind lets it rest, and speeding on those pretty points when it is not
flying. The streets of London are among its many highways, for it is
fragile enough to go far in all sorts of weather. But it gets disabled
if a rough gust tumbles it on the water so that its finely-feathered feet
are wet. On gentle breezes it is able to cross dry-shod, walking the
waters.
All unlike is this pilgrim star to the tethered constellations. It is
far adrift. It goes singly to all the winds. It offers thistle plants
(or whatever is the flower that makes such delicate ashes) to the tops of
many thousand hills. Doubtless the farmer would rather have to meet it
in battalions than in these invincible units astray. But if the farmer
owes it a lawful grudge, there is many a rigid riverside garden wherein
it would be a great pleasure to sow the thistles of the nearest pasture.