f its Lake Tchad,
and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the
Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are there
to be found? In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the
night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads. The expeditions
up the Nile as yet extend but to the Cataracts, or perchance to the
mouth of the White Nile; but it is the Black Nile that concerns us.

I shall be a benefactor, if I conquer some realms from the night,--if I
report to the gazettes anything transpiring about us at that season
worthy of their attention,--if I can show men that there is some beauty
awake while they are asleep,--if I add to the domains of poetry.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day. I soon
discovered that I was acquainted only with its complexion; and as for
the moon, I had seen her only as it were through a crevice in a shutter,
occasionally. Why not walk a little way in her light?

Suppose you attend to the suggestions which the moon makes for one
month, commonly in vain, will it not be very different from anything in
literature or religion? But why not study this Sanscrit? What if one
moon has come and gone, with its world of poetry, its weird teachings,
its oracular suggestions,--so divine a creature freighted with hints for
me, and I have not used her,--one moon gone by unnoticed?

I think it was Dr. Chalmers who said, criticizing Coleridge, that for
his part he wanted ideas which he could see all round, and not such as
he must look at away up in the heavens. Such a man, one would say, would
never look at the moon, because she never turns her other side to us.
The light which comes from ideas which have their orbit as distant from
the earth, and which is no less cheering and enlightening to the
benighted traveller than that of the moon and stars, is naturally
reproached or nicknamed as moonshine by such. They are moonshine, are
they? Well, then, do your night-travelling when there is no moon to
light you; but I will be thankful for the light that reaches me from the
star of least magnitude. Stars are lesser or greater only as they appear
to us so. I will be thankful that I see so much as one side of a
celestial idea, one side of the rainbow and the sunset sky.

Men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if they knew its qualities
very well, and despised them,--as owls might talk of sunshine. None of
your sunshine!--but this word