Ceres’ Runaway & Other Essays

<h2>THE TETHERED CONSTELLATIONS</h2> <p>It is no small thing&mdash;no light discovery&mdash;to find a river Andromeda and Arcturus and their bright neighbours wheeling for half a summer night around a pole-star in the waters.&nbsp; One star or two&mdash;delicate visitants of streams&mdash;we are used to see, somewhat by a sleight of the eyes, so fine and so fleeting is that apparition.&nbsp; Or the southern waves may show the light&mdash;not the image&mdash;of the evening or the morning planet.&nbsp; But this, in a pool of the country Thames at night, is no ripple-lengthened light; it is the startling image of a whole large constellation burning in the flood.</p> <p>These reflected heavens are different heavens.&nbsp; On a darker and more vacant field than that of the real skies, the shape of the Lyre or the Bear has an altogether new and noble solitude; and the waters play a painter&rsquo;s part in setting their splendid subject free.&nbsp; Two movements shake but do not scatter the still night: the bright flashing of constellations in the deep Weir-pool, and the dark flashes of the vague bats flying.&nbsp; The stars in the stream fluctuate with an alien motion.&nbsp; Reversed, estranged, isolated, every shape of large stars escapes and returns, escapes and returns.&nbsp; Fitful in the steady night, those constellations, so few, so whole, and so remote, have a suddenness of gleaming life.&nbsp; You imagine that some unexampled gale might make them seem to shine with such a movement in the veritable sky; yet nothing but deep water, seeming still in its incessant flight and rebound, could really show such altered stars.&nbsp; The flood lets a constellation fly, as Juliet&rsquo;s &ldquo;wanton&rdquo; with a tethered bird, only to pluck it home again.&nbsp; At moments some rhythmic flux of the water seems about to leave the darkly-set, widely-spaced Bear absolutely at large, to dismiss the great stars, and refuse to imitate the skies, and all the water is obscure; then one broken star returns, then fragments of another, and a third and a fourth flit back to their noble places, brilliantly vague, wonderfully visible, mobile, and unalterable.&nbsp; There is nothing else at once so keen and so elusive.</p> <p>The aspen poplar had been in captive flight all day, but with no such vanishings as these.&nbsp; The dimmer constellations of the soft night are reserved by the skies.&nbsp; Hardly is a secondary star seen by the large and vague eyes of the stream.&nbsp; They are blind to the Pleiades.</p> <p>There is a little kind of star that drowns itself by hundreds in the river Thames&mdash;the many-rayed silver-white seed that makes journeys on all the winds up and down England and across it in the end of summer.&nbsp; It is a most expert traveller, turning a little wheel a-tiptoe wherever the wind lets it rest, and speeding on those pretty points when it is not flying.&nbsp; The streets of London are among its many highways, for it is fragile enough to go far in all sorts of weather.&nbsp; But it gets disabled if a rough gust tumbles it on the water so that its finely-feathered feet are wet.&nbsp; On gentle breezes it is able to cross dry-shod, walking the waters.</p> <p>All unlike is this pilgrim star to the tethered constellations.&nbsp; It is far adrift.&nbsp; It goes singly to all the winds.&nbsp; It offers thistle plants (or whatever is the flower that makes such delicate ashes) to the tops of many thousand hills.&nbsp; Doubtless the farmer would rather have to meet it in battalions than in these invincible units astray.&nbsp; But if the farmer owes it a lawful grudge, there is many a rigid riverside garden wherein it would be a great pleasure to sow the thistles of the nearest pasture.</p> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />