The night sky was counted beautiful because of its stars. The recurrent conception is that the azure heavens are adorned with these orbs of gold. The favorite words are “spangled” and “gilded.”[80] In Young’s “Night Thoughts” we might expect to find some faithful and sympathetic study of the nocturnal heavens, but in the first eight books not seventy-five lines refer even remotely to external Nature, and in the ninth book the stress is laid on “the moral emanations of the skies.” In his efforts to find a sufficiently varied star vocabulary, Young was driven to the invention of some new phrases, but in no case do they show imaginative power. They are perfunctory and stiff and indicate that his mind was on the “system of divinity” he meant his stars to teach rather than on the stars themselves.[81] In Burnet’s “Theory of the Earth,” a work already quoted from, we find a striking, because an exaggerated, example of the way an undue love of order could modify one’s aesthetic perception. Burnet enjoyed the night sky but he felt that the stars might have been more artistically arranged: They lie carelessly scattered as if they had been sown in the heaven like seed, by handfuls, and not by a skilful hand neither. What a beautiful hemisphere they would have made if they had been placed in rank and order; if they had all been disposed into regular figures, and the little ones set with due regard to the greater, and then all finished and made up into one fair piece or great composition according to the rules of art and symmetry! What a surprising beauty this would have been to the inhabitants of the earth! What a lovely roof to our little world! This indeed might have given us some temptation to have thought that they had been all made for us; but lest any such vain imagination should now enter into our thoughts Providence (besides more important reasons) seems on purpose to have left them under the negligence or disorder which they appear unto us.[82] The final impression from the study of these passages that refer to stars or moonlight is that the poets of this period were not unlike Peter Bell into whose heart “nature ne’er could find the way.” Nor for the moon cared he a tittle, And for the stars he cared as little.[83]