Page:The Friendly Stars by Martha Evans Martin.djvu/22

Rh 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

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