Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/106

 mean temperature higher than its degrees should give it, the chill of the night serves only to shed fog or mist upon the lower stratum of air; but in warmer climates,—and in no country is it more so than in Syria,—the vast burden of the watery element which the fervour of day has raised aloft becomes, quickly after sunset, a prodigious dew, breaking down upon the earth, as a mighty, yet noiseless deluge:—the aerial load is suddenly thrown off upon the lap of earth, and so it is that, almost in a moment, the veil is drawn aside from the starry fields.

The planets, and the stars upon which the shepherds of Palestine were used to gaze, and which to them were guiding lights, do not seem as if they were fain to go out from moment to moment; but each burns in its socket, as a lamp that is well fed with oil. We, in this latitude, have borrowed—for technical purposes in our Astronomy—the Chaldean groupings of the stars into the contours of monsters and demi-gods; but, unless we had so borrowed these celestial romances, we should never have imagined them for ourselves. The nightly heavens in warmer climates show the celestial giants with a bold distinctness; and under those skies these imputed forms of the astral clusters look down upon the earth as if they were real beings, and as if each glowing cluster—Pleiades, Orion, Mazzaroth, and Arcturus, and their companions—were possessed of a conscious life.

The pastoral usages of Palestine greatly favoured