Page:Bierce - Collected Works - Volume 09.djvu/66

62 pany of authors with private systems of astronomy. The imagination robust enough to conceive a crescent moon in the east at nightfall might even claim a place in a dime museum.

Spielhagan has his full moon on the horizon at midnight by the castle clock.

But the novelists are not alone in their ignorance of what is before their eyes all their blessed lives: the poets know no more than they. In her Songs of the Night-Watches Jean Ingelow compels "a slender moon" to "float up from behind " a person looking at the sunset sky, and afterward makes the full moon "behind some ruined roof swim up" at daybreak. To rout out the moon so early and make it get up, when it must have been up all night attending to its duty as a full moon of orderly habits, is a trifle heartless. In "Daylight and Moonlight," Longfellow, who seems imperfectly to have known how the latter was produced, tells of a time when at mid-day he saw the moon

Sailing high, but faint and white As a schoolboy's paper kite.

Now if It was sailing high at noon it must