Stars Topics

“What I want is a strange conjunction with you—” he said quietly; “Mnot meeting and mingling;Myou are quite right:Mbut an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings:Mas the stars balance each other.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)

It was interesting, when awakened at midnight, to watch the grotesque and fiend-like forms and motions of some one of the party, who, not being able to sleep, had got up silently to arouse the fire.... Thus aroused, I, too, brought fresh fuel to the fire, and then rambled along the sandy shore in the moonlight, hoping to meet a moose come down to drink, or else a wolf. The little rill tinkled the louder, and peopled all the wilderness for me; and the glassy smoothness of the sleeping lake, laving the shores of a new world, with the dark, fantastic rocks rising here and there from its surface, made a scene not easily described. It has left such an impression of stern, yet gentle, wildness on my memory as will not be soon effaced.... When next we awoke, the moon and the stars were shining again, and there were signs of dawn in the east.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

As we looked up in silence to those distant lights, we were reminded that it was a rare imagination which first taught that the stars are worlds, and had conferred a great benefit on mankind.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)