heart
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.

He who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.

Bryant

THE FASCINATION OF LIGHT

The strange fascination of light takes hold of all animated creatures,
and commands a subtle devotion that cannot be set forth in a confession
of faith. The delight of a boy in a bonfire is a breath of the heaven
that is about us in our infancy. Though it be but a heap of rubbish,
revealed by the removal of the mantle of snow, lighting up with
flickering, changing glow a rectangular door yard, the children stand
and gaze into the dancing flame, their vast, distorted, ghostlike
shadows lost in the night, their faces reflecting every evanescent
glare, and their spirits charmed by the same spell that took form in the
fire-worship of their ancestors. How they delight in stirring up the
embers and sending up a fountain spray of sparks! What joy in seeing the
big sticks break into glowing coals, darting out new tongues of flame to
lick up the escaping embers!

Fire is one of nature's universal fascinations. The wildest and most
wary animals approach and gaze at it in the night, and though it
sometimes warns them off, it always holds them by a spell. The night
migrating birds perish in scores against the plate-glass of coast
lighthouses, swerving from the control of the all-powerful migratory
instinct toward the fascinating glare that is their destruction. It is
not sportsmanlike to hang a lantern in the marsh and shoot the duck that
gather under it. But the night, the silent marsh, and the lantern have
charms that the sportsman, with his legal and mechanical paraphernalia,
can never understand. Fish are devoted fire-worshippers, and that boy
who has never speared by a jack-light is an object of compassion.

The earth and the waters under the earth have no more fascinating sight
than the gray, silent form of a pike, moving and motionless in the
shallow water, a shadow more tangible than himself thrown by a
jack-light on the mottled yellow rocks and sands of the bottom. A
passing breath of wind, even the slightest motion of the punt, breaks
every shadow and indentation into myriad fleeting ripples and waves of
light, transforming the slender, silent fish into a sheaf of wriggling
glimmers. With the stilling