In both these fancies Adam is much disturbed by his first experience of the dark, a guilty conscience made a coward of him. But not all Hebrew homilists rested in this attitude of fear. The author of the eighth Psalm is above all the poet of the night in its more uplifting aspects. He sees not the terror, but the illumination of the dark. The poet contemplates the heavens at night; he does not mention the sun, but “the moon and the stars” which God has ordained. “Unquestionably, the star-lit sky, especially in the transparent clearness of an Eastern atmosphere, is more suggestive of the vastness and variety and mystery of the universe.” So writes Dr. Kirkpatrick on Psalm 8. 3, and he refers to an eloquent passage in Whewell’s _Astronomy_, Book III, Chapter 3. Certainly those who have beheld the heavens on an Oriental night can conceive nothing more glorious than the spectacle, nor recall aught more wonderful than the Psalmist’s description of it. It was left to the theologian Blanco White to combine the two thoughts of fear and illumination, expressed in the Midrash quoted above and in Psalm 8, into an exquisite Sonnet. The author’s name is queer enough. But though Joseph Blanco White (1775-1841) was born in Seville, he was an Irishman by descent. When the family settled in Spain, they translated the patronymic White into Blanco. On his coming to England, the theologian simply retained both forms of the name. As the writer in the _Dictionary of National Biography_ recalls, Blanco White applied to himself the lines which occur in _Richard II_, Act i, scene 3. Norfolk, doomed to exile in a foreign land, thus laments his fate: The language I have learn’d these forty years, My native English, now I must forgo; And now my tongue’s use is to me no more Than an unstringèd viol or a harp. Strange that this passage, of which only a small part has been here quoted, has never been turned into Hebrew, with a change in one single word of the second line, by a Zionist. Yet more strange that Blanco White, who thus deplored the fact that his paternal English was not his native speech, has given us one of the greatest poems in the English language! Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew Thee, from report divine, and heard thy name, Did he not tremble for this lovely Frame, This glorious canopy of Light and Blue? Yet ’neath a curtain of translucent dew, Bathed in the rays of the great setting Flame, Hesperus with the Host of Heaven came, And lo! Creation widened in Man’s view. Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed Within thy beams, O sun! or who could find, Whilst fly, and leaf, and insect stood revealed, That to such countless Orbs thou mad’st us blind? Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife? If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?