How infinitely it adds to the beauty of star-names such as Aldebaran, Alcyone, Polaris, to know that to the swarthy nomads of the desert it imaged itself as one following in a skyey desert, a camel-driver tracking lost camels, a hound following a quarry, a warrior following a foe, a holy pilgrim tracking the difficult ways of God, so that no name seemed to them so apt as _Al Dabarān_, the Follower: or to know that to the pastoral Akkadians or the early tillers and hunters of sea-set Greece, looking at the Pleiades in winter, Alcyone in its lovely group suggested the Nest of the Halcyon, the summer-bird who had flown to the remote depths of the sky to sit and brood there on a windless wave-unreached nest till once again ‘the Halcyon days’ of calm settled on land and sea: or to know that to our own seafaring folk of old, the men who voyaged perilously in small and frail craft without compass and with little knowledge of the mysterious laws of the mysterious forces of earth and sea and heaven, Polaris was the one unchanging skyey beacon, the steadfast unswerving North Star; and, so, lovingly called by our old Saxon forbears the _Scipsteorra_, the Ship-Star, and by the Elizabethan seafarers the Lodestar or Pilot-Star, and by the Hebridean fishermen the Home-Star, and by others the Star of the Sea. “Constellations come, and climb the heavens, and go. Star of the Pole! and thou dost see them set. Alone in thy cold skies, Thou keep’st thy old unmoving station yet Nor join’st the dances of that glittering train, Nor dipp’st thy virgin orb in the blue western main. On thy unaltering blaze The half-wrecked mariner, his compass lost, Fixes his steady gaze, And steers, undoubting, to the friendly coast; And they who stray in perilous wastes by night Are glad when thou dost shine to guide their footsteps right.” The same spirit which animated Bryant when he wrote these verses in his beautiful ‘Hymn to the North Star,’ or made one of the Gaelic island-poets allude to it as the Star of Compassion, prevailed with these Chaldæan shepherds and Arabian nomads of old. They gave the familiar or beautiful names of love or intimate life, and in exchange the taciturn face of heaven lost its terrifying menace of silence, and the Night became a comrade, became the voice of the poets, of the sages, of the prophets and seers, the silver gateways of the Unknown.