In the night the eyes are partly closed, or retire into the head. Other senses take the lead. The walker is guided as well by the sense of smell. Every plant and field and forest emits its odor now,--swamp-pink in the meadow, and tansy in the road; and there is the peculiar dry scent of corn which has begun to show its tassels. The senses both of hearing and smelling are more alert. We hear the tinkling of rills which we never detected before. From time to time, high up on the sides of hills, you pass through a stratum of warm air: a blast which has come up from the sultry plains of noon. It tells of the day, of sunny noon-tide hours and banks, of the laborer wiping his brow and the bee humming amid flowers. It is an air in which work has been done,--which men have breathed. It circulates about from wood-side to hill-side, like a dog that has lost its master, now that the sun is gone. The rocks retain all night the warmth of the sun which they have absorbed. And so does the sand: if you dig a few inches into it, you find a warm bed. You lie on your back on a rock in a pasture on the top of some bare hill at midnight, and speculate on the height of the starry canopy. The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show. A companion with whom I was sailing, one very windy, but bright moonlight night, when the stars were few and faint, thought that a man could get along with _them_, though he was considerably reduced in his circumstances,--that they were a kind of bread and cheese that never failed. No wonder that there have been astrologers,--that some have conceived that they were personally related to particular stars. Du Bartas, as translated by Sylvester, says he'll "not believe that the Great Architect With all these fires the heavenly arches decked Only for shew, and with these glistering shields, 'T awake poor shepherds, watching in the fields,"-- he'll "not believe that the least flower which pranks Our garden-borders or our common banks, And the least stone that in her warming lap Our Mother Earth doth covetously wrap, Hath some peculiar virtue of its own, And that the glorious stars of heaven have none." And Sir Walter Raleigh well says, "The stars are instruments of far greater use than to give an obscure light, and for men to gaze on after sunset"; and he quotes Plotinus as affirming that they "are significant, but not efficient"; and also Augustine as saying, "_Deus regit inferiora corpora per superiora_": God rules the bodies below by those above. But best of all is this, which another writer has expressed: "_Sapiens adjuvabit opus astrorum quemadmodum agricola terrae naturam_": A wise man assisteth the work of the stars as the husbandman helpeth the nature of the soil.