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Show Moon Magic. (London Spectator.) The moon, of call heavenly luminaries, lumina-ries, is the most closely associated with humanity; she is the mother of romance. Her alternate subjection to and triumph over the earth-rorn clouds seem to bring her into nearnoss and endow her with a tolerant and tender aspect. In the moonless, starry sky at night we all are conscious of a sense of mystery and aloofness, the stars have other concerns than the small destinies of man; they never lodk in at our windows and shine upon i our roof trees as does the moon. The very light that reaches us from lliej awful distance of the stars is ages old j and cold with the silence of the stellar spaces the imagination shrinks before) it. But with the rising of the moon i come the whole troop of elves and fairies riding her slender crescent: she is the familiar Puck, "the oldest old thing in England," and as she waxes to her silver round all the passion pas-sion and the poetry and the glamour with which up-grazing mankind has invested her gives to the moon another an-other light than that she borrows from the sun. The magic of the moon is part of the very fabric of English poetry to withdraw the varied moons from the poet's pages would be to dim much radiance with twilight. Hardly a mood, from despair and madness, to the most innocent and childlike joy, but finds its reflection on tjje. moon's changing face. |