The Wrecking of the Moon

Too Long; Didn't Read

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. Its air, its waters, its clouds, its life are gone, and only a skeleton remains—a mute but eloquent witness to a cosmical tragedy without parallel in the range of human knowledge.