the Seven Beneficent Spirits, or made the Winter 

 modern poet of Locksley Hall liken them Stars, 

 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 Dabaran, 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 

 297 



