To Dante, as to the Greeks, it is not the unusual or startling that appeals, but the unfailing harmony of the regular celestial movements. Comets he mentions only twice, and shooting stars twice, eclipses seven times; but there are scores of allusions to the rhythmical progression of Sun and stars, Moon and planets. The skies were familiar to him in all their daily aspects—sunset and dawn and radiant noons; cloudy nights “sotto pover cielo,”[166] brilliant starlit nights, nights of clear moonlight. He had seen the stars fade one by one, till at last even the brightest vanished in the glow of dawn:— ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [166] “Under a poor sky.” _Purg._ xvi. 2. “E come vien la chiarissima ancella Del sol più oltre, così il ciel sì chiude Di vista in vista, infino alla più bella.”[167] [167] “And as advances, bright exceedingly, The handmaid of the sun, the heaven is closed, Light after light, to the most beautiful.” _Par._ xxx. 7-9. (_Longfellow_). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ he had watched for their first appearance in the evening twilight:— “E sì come al salir di prima sera Comincian per lo ciel nuove parvenze, Sì che la vista pare e non par vera....”[168] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [168] “As at evening hour Of twilight, new appearances through heaven Peer with faint glimmer, doubtfully descried.” _Par._ xiv. 70-72. (_Carey_). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Numberless other passages and expressions will occur to every Dante reader, proving how keenly he felt the beauty of the skies. But they prove more than this. Other authors have felt and have described poetically the beauties of the skies, but they often remember imperfectly what they saw, or draw upon their imagination without any knowledge of the celestial movements, and so fall into absurd mistakes. The moon especially is a stumbling-block, and it is quite a rare thing for a modern novelist to introduce one without making it do something impossible. A new moon will rise at midnight, or a waning moon at sunset; she has even been known to rise and then to set in the dark hours of one short midsummer night;[169] and a well known author sees her in two phases at the same moment: “the full moon rose, yellow _and gibbous_!”[170] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [169] In Kenneth Grahame’s delightful book, full of sympathy with Nature, _The Wind in the Willows_. The moon rose when it was “past ten o’clock,” and “sank earthwards reluctantly and left them” before dawn. [170] H. G. Wells, _The Time Machine_. ------------------------------------------------------------------------