{The day is bright, our hearts are light.}
{How sweet to rove through wood and dell.}

or the well known air in _Mignon_:

_Legeres hirondelles,
Oiseaux benis de Dieu,
Ouvrez-ouvrez vos ailes,
Envolez-vous! adieu!_

{Farewell, happy Swallows, farewell!}
{With summer for ever to dwell}
{Ye leave our northern strand}
{For the genial southern land}
{Balmy with breezes bland.}
{Return? Ah, who can tell?}
{Farewell, happy Swallows, farewell!}

Barbican was much gratified to find that his rockets and other fireworks
had not received the least injury. He relied upon them for the
performance of a very important service as soon as the Projectile,
having passed the point of neutral attraction between the Earth and the
Moon, would begin to fall with accelerated velocity towards the Lunar
surface. This descent, though--thanks to the respective volumes of the
attracting bodies--six times less rapid than it would have been on the
surface of the Earth, would still be violent enough to dash the
Projectile into a thousand pieces. But Barbican confidently expected by
means of his powerful rockets to offer very considerable obstruction to
the violence of this fall, if not to counteract its terrible effects
altogether.

The inspection having thus given general satisfaction, the travellers
once more set themselves to watching external space through the lights
in the sides and the floor of the Projectile.

Everything still appeared to be in the same state as before. Nothing was
changed. The vast arch of the celestial dome glittered with stars, and
constellations blazed with a light clear and pure enough to throw an
astronomer into an ecstasy of admiration. Below them shone the Sun, like
the mouth of a white-hot furnace, his dazzling disc defined sharply on
the pitch-black back-ground of the sky. Above them the Moon, reflecting
back his rays from her glowing surface, appeared to stand motionless in
the midst of the starry host.

A little to the east of the Sun, they could see a pretty large dark
spot, like a hole in the sky, the broad silver fringe on one edge fading
off into a faint glimmering mist on the other--it was the Earth. Here
and there in all directions, nebulous masses gleamed like large flakes
of star dust, in which, from nadir to zenith, the eye could trace
without a break that vast ring of impalpable star powder, the famous
_Milky Way_, through the midst of whi