"In the silence of the transparent night, before the rising of the moon, the charm of the ancient tale sometimes descends upon me out of the scintillant sky, to make me forget the monstrous facts of science and the stupendous horror of space. Then I no longer behold the Milky Way, as that awful Ring of Cosmos, whose hundred million suns are powerless to lighten the abyss, but as the very Amanogwa itself--the river Celestial. I see the thrill of its shining stream, the mists that hover along the verge, and the watergrasses that bend in the winds of autumn. White Orihime I see at her starry loom and the Ox that grazes on the farther shore--and I know that the falling dew is the spray of the Herdsman's oar." There are any number of references to the Milky Way throughout the realms of poetry. Amelia describes it as "a fair illumined path That leadeth upward to the gate of heaven." Milton--an "ample road whose dust is gold And pavement stars as stars to thee appear." Ovid--a "high-road" "whose groundwork is of stars": "A way there is, in heaven's expanded plain, Which, when the skies are clear, is seen below, And mortals, by the name of Milky, know. The ground work is of stars; through which the road Lies open to the Thunderer's abode." --_Ovid's Metamorphoses_ (DRYDEN'S _Trans._) Chaucer calls it "Watling street": "Lo," quoth he, "cast up thine eye, See yonder, lo! the galaxie, The which men clepe the Milky Way For it is white; and some parfay Callen it Watling streete." This great street was "brent with hete," he goes on to say, when the "Sunne's sonne" lost control of the sun-chariot, "that he could no governaunce." In Germany this same street was called "Irmin's Way," for the Saxon God Irmin was believed to ride along here in a ponderous brazen chariot now seen in the constellation of the Great Bear. In 1609 Galileo, the distinguished Italian astronomer, turned his newly invented telescope toward this mysterious illuminated arch, and saw, to his delight, that it was a "track of countless stars." This fact, which he proclaimed to the world, has even more lure for the imaginative mind than a "road whose dust is gold." A modern poet describes it as "Infinity's illimitable fields where bloom the worlds like flowers about God's feet." Thus the cold glass eye of the telescope does not, like the eye of the Medusa, turn a singing heart into stone. Some of the early writers, such as Ovid, evidently suspected that the Milky Way consisted of millions of distant stars, but the suggestion did not take well with the mass of people who preferred the belief that it was a radiant stairway used by the angels.