Is it begun? Not--well, I don't know, though. Something seems to be happening up in the northwest corner. Certainly, a bit of that round disk has been shaved off. I will wait five minutes. Yes, the battle is begun. The shadow advances. The moon yields. But there are watchers in the heaven as well as in the earth. There is sympathy in the skies. Up floats an argosy of compassionate clouds, and fling their fleecy veil around the pallid moon, and bear her softly on their snowy bosoms. But she moves on, impelled. She sweeps beyond the sad clouds. Deeper and deeper into the darkness. Closer and closer the Shadow clutches her in his inexorable arms. Wan and weird becomes her face, wrathful and wild the astonished winds; and for all her science and her faith, the Earth trembles in the night, and a hush of awe quivers through the angry, agitated air. On, still on, till the fair and smiling moon is but a dull and tawny orb, with no beauty to be desired; on, still on, till even that cold, coppery light wanes into sullen darkness. Whether it is a cloud kindly hiding the humbled queen, or whether the queen is indeed merged in the abyss of the Shadow, I cannot tell, and it is dismal waiting to see. The wildness is gone with the moon, and there is nothing left but a dark night. I wonder how long before she will reappear? Are the people in the moon staring through an eclipse of the Sun? I should like to see her come out again, and clothe herself in splendor. I think I will go back to Walden. Ah! even my philosopher, aping Homer, nods. It shimmers a little, on the lake, among the mountains--of the moon. I declare! I believe I have been asleep. What of it? It is just as well. I have no doubt the moon will come out again all right,--which is more than I shall do if I go on in this way. I feel already as if the top of my head was coming off. Once I was very unhappy, and I sat up all night to make the most of it. It was many hundred years ago, when I was younger than I am now, and did not know that misery was not a thing to be caressed and cosseted and coddled, but a thing to be taken, neck and heels, and turned out doors. So I sat up to revel in the ecstasy of woe. I went along swimmingly into the little hours, but by two o'clock there was a great sameness about it, and I grew desperately sleepy. I was not going to give it up, however, so I shocked myself into a torpid animation with a cold bath, it being mid-winter, and betwixt bath and bathos, managed to keep agoing till daylight. Once since then I was very happy, and could not keep my eyes shut. Those are the only two times I ever sat up all night, and, on the whole, I think I will go to bed; wherefore, O people on the earth, marking eagerly the moon's eclipse, and O people on the moon, crowding your craggy hills to see an eclipse of the sun, Good night!