The Wrecking of the Moon
There are sympathetic moods under whose influence one gazes with a
certain poignant tenderness at the worn face of the moon; that little
``fossil world'' (the child of our mother earth, too) bears such
terrible scars of its brief convulsive life that a sense of pity is
awakened by the sight. The moon is the wonder-land of the telescope.
Those towering mountains, whose ``proud aspiring peaks'' cast
silhouettes of shadow that seem drawn with india-ink; those vast
plains, enchained with gentle winding hills and bordered with giant
ranges; those oval ``oceans,'' where one looks expectant for the flash
of wind-whipped waves; those enchanting ``bays'' and recesses at the
seaward feet of the Alps; those broad straits passing between guardian
heights incomparably mightier than Gibraltar; those locket-like
valleys as secluded among their mountains as the Vale of Cashmere;
those colossal craters that make us smile at the pretensions of
Vesuvius, Etna, and Cotopaxi; those strange white ways which pass with
the unconcern of Roman roads across mountain, gorge, and valley -- all
these give the beholder an irresistible impression that it is truly a
world into which he is looking, a world akin to ours, and yet no more
like our world than Pompeii is like Naples.
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