Читать книгу The Friendly Stars - Martha Evans Martin - Страница 3

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The chief aim of this book is to share with others the pleasure which the writer has had in what may be called a relation of personal friendship with the stars. In this relation one knows the more conspicuous ones by name and at a glance; and is able to greet them as pleasant acquaintances when they return year after year in the due seasons, or each evening as they pass over their prescribed paths serene and stately, or dancing and twinkling, according to their several habits.

One has a fine sense of companionship with the stars when he has secured this kind of acquaintance with them—when on looking out of the window at any hour of the night he can see a familiar face twinkling at him as if in friendly recognition of the fact that he must know it is due at that hour and is expecting to see it; or when, on a cold midnight in late February, before the trees and birds have announced the spring-time, he sees a bright, bluish, scintillating point just pushing up over the eastern horizon and knows that Vega has come to grace the skies again and that spring will surely come with her.

Such a feeling for the stars is not induced by exciting wonder at the expanse and mystery of the heavens, nor by burdening and oppressing the mind with the vastness that seems beyond all compassing in thought, but by showing how the stars, like the flowers and the trees, are but parts of the visible beauty of nature which have their share in making "the perfect whole."

Plants and birds come in their turn

"As the revolving seasons rise Above the tree-tops star by star,"

and the steady advance of the changing season gets a definiteness and an interest to one otherwise impossible when he has learned to associate the visible signs of the progress of the year as they appear in the skies as well as on the earth. He will then associate the blooming of the blood-root and the first warble of the bluebirds with the eastern splendor of Arcturus and the blooming of the maples. When he watches in the daytime for the first blue violets he will look the same evening for the blue twinkling face of Vega. He will know that the juncos and Sirius leave us at about the same time in the spring; that when the golden-rod and the wild asters are blooming it is time to look for Fomalhaut and that Antares is about to go; and a creaking, frosty night will make him involuntarily turn his eyes up to mighty Orion striding across the southern skies.

Such things as these, that are so dear to the heart of the lover of nature, are not learned as one learns a lesson, or by the being told, but by coming into a personal relation, a relation very easily established by one who really desires it, with the flowers and trees and birds and stars, knowing them all in their seasons and their associations.

For such knowledge as this no technical information is necessary, though it may be followed by a desire for technical knowledge. The two are quite different things. But one can come to no real appreciation of anything in nature without some knowledge of particular objects. The acquirement of it is just as important and just as easy with the stars as with the flowers. One may revel in the beauty of a whole field of grass and flowers, but his heart gives a leap when he sees among them the face of some flower that he knows and likes, and he cries, "There's a lily," or a gentian, or whatever it may be. Birds may flit around us as we sit in the woods, and we note them as black, yellow, pretty, or whatever, and we think we are getting all the pleasure we can from them; but interest quickens when one comes that we can name, and it at once has an individuality and an importance which none the rest have.

So it is with the stars: a starry night is beautiful and we gaze at it and enjoy it and do not care to know more about it in detail. But if by chance we come to know by name one bright star, it immediately separates itself from all the others and becomes an individual. If we enlarge our acquaintance in the skies, the whole aspect of the heavens is changed, and, instead of a brilliant assembly of impersonal points of light, we see a host of individuals that we know as bright Capella, sombre Betelgeuse, and others.

And this satisfaction we may secure without troubling about meridians and ecliptics, or right ascension and declination, or any other of the scientific trappings of the stars, just as we have it with the flowers without attending to sepals and petals, or pistils and anthers, and with the birds without any thought of anatomical classification. The only thing one needs to do in order to have such an acquaintance with the stars is to look for them: and this book aims to show how and when and where to look for them in the easiest possible way.

Any especially scientific information will be omitted, the desire being to make the stars as interesting in themselves as possible and to show how simple a matter it is to know in an intelligent but untechnical way the choicest individuals among them, the leading facts concerning them, their bearing in practical life, and all that is individually beautiful and important about them. This, it is believed, will yield a pleasure such that any one who has once experienced it will feel is a very large reward for the small labor that it really entails.

Instead of its being a dry and difficult thing to acquire any particular knowledge of the stars, one, if rightly directed, will find on pursuing the subject only just a little way that, while giving himself next to no trouble about it, he can soon come to know the more notable ones by name and to have a fair fund of practical information about them; and that many of the stars, which now all look so much alike to him, will have acquired such an individuality that he can recognize them at a glance in whatever position in the skies he may see them. And he will find, too, that the pleasure one never fails to have in the spectacle of the whole sky is multiplied many times for him as soon as he knows something of the individuals that make up this splendid panorama.

It is an interesting fact that the stars as individuals figure a great deal more prominently in old than in modern literature, and the writers of the older literature show a more personal acquaintance with them than the writers of the later literature show. This intimate knowledge of the stars really preceded the science of astronomy. The stars were better known even to people at large before there was any such science than they are known now, and there is only too much justice in Emerson's reproach that now, in these days of nautical almanacs, "the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe, the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind."

The explanation of this difference is that people in earlier times, being more out of doors than the people of the present day, were more observant of out-door objects and took more interest in them. For it is, after all, mainly a matter of observation; and for learning to know the leading stars and getting the interest that attends an acquaintance with them, little more is needful than simply looking at them. It is looking at them, too, with only the naked eye; for all the stars that attract special notice and have individual names were noticed and so named long before the invention of the telescope; and the principal constellations were traced and named by simple shepherds who tended their flocks at night in the open fields and had nothing to aid them but their own eyes and fancy.