The stellar road, it has imaginatively been con- 

 Milky ceived by almost every people, though many 

 ^' races have delighted in the bestowal of a 

 specific name, as though it were not an 

 aggregation of star- clusters and nebulae, but 

 a marvellous creature of the heavens, as, 

 perhaps, we may conceive the Great Bear, 

 or Orion, or moons-beset Jupiter, or Saturn 

 among his mysterious rings. Thus in the 

 Book of Job it is called the Crooked Serpent ; 

 the Hindus of Northern India call it the Dove 

 of Paradise (Swarga Duari), though they have 

 or had a still finer name signifying the Court 

 of God ; and the Polynesians give it the 

 strange but characteristic designation, ' The 

 Long, Blue, Cloud-Eating Shark.' 



Last night I watched the immense tract 

 for a long time. There was frost in the air, 

 for I saw that singular pulsation which rightly 

 or wrongly is commonly held to be an optical 

 illusion, the aspect as of a pulse, or of an 

 undulating motion of life such as one might 

 dimly perceive in the still respiration of some 

 sleeping saurian. There appeared to be count- 

 less small stars, and in the darker spaces the 

 pale vaporous drift became like the trail of 

 phosphorescence in the wake of a vessel : at 

 times it seemed almost solid, a road paven 

 with diamonds and the dust of precious stones, 



222 



