Study Edition · Essay 53
Night and Moonlight
Source: Atlantic Monthly, November 1863 (published after Thoreau's death, from his lecture notes); collected in Excursions (1863). Text from Project Gutenberg #9846. ABRIDGED: about half the essay, keeping the opening, the description of a July night, the moon's battle with the clouds and the ending; several long quotations from other writers are omitted. Omissions are marked. Archaic verb forms modernized; vocabulary kept and glossed.
Thoreau, author of Walden, took regular night walks around Concord, Massachusetts, in the early 1850s and filled his journal with them. This essay, put together from his lecture notes, invites us to explore the night the way explorers of his time were exploring Africa. He notices how moonlight changes everything: shadows matter more than objects, smells and sounds take over from sight, and the moon seems to fight its way through the clouds. Look for his love of surprising comparisons and the way he moves from precise nature-writing to spiritual meaning.
88 sentences: 43 simple, 35 moderate, 10 complex. Hover a number for its paraphrase; click it for the full note.
Key Vocabulary
- seleniticrelating to the moon (from Greek selene, moon)
- perchanceperhaps (old)
- benefactorsomeone who does good for others
- gazettea newspaper
- profaneordinary; not holy
- oracularmysterious and prophetic, like an oracle
- benightedovertaken by darkness; lost in ignorance
- gliblyin a quick, easy, careless way
- pensivethoughtful, often a little sad
- inundationa flood
- conspicuouseasily seen; standing out
- variegatedmarked with patches of different colours
- phosphorescentglowing faintly in the dark
- stratuma layer
- obscuredhidden; covered
- dissipatingscattering; breaking up
- primevalbelonging to the earliest ages
- confoundedmixed up; confused
- garishunpleasantly bright and showy
The Essay
Chancing to take a memorable walk by moonlight some years ago, I resolved to take more such walks, and make acquaintance with another side of nature: I have done so.1
According to Pliny, there is a stone in Arabia called Selenites, “wherein is a white, which increases and decreases with the moon.”2 My journal for the last year or two, has been selenitic in this sense.3
Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us?4 Are we not tempted to explore it, to penetrate to the shores of its lake Tchad, and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon?5 Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are there to be found?6 In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads.7 The expeditions up the Nile as yet extend but to the Cataracts, or perchance to the mouth of the White Nile; but it is the Black Nile that concerns us.8
I shall be a benefactor if I conquer some realms from the night, if I report to the gazettes anything transpiring about us at that season worthy of their attention, if I can show men that there is some beauty awake while they are asleep, if I add to the domains of poetry.9
Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.10 I soon discovered that I was acquainted only with its complexion, and as for the moon, I had seen her only as it were through a crevice in a shutter, occasionally.11 Why not walk a little way in her light?12
Suppose you attend to the suggestions which the moon makes for one month, commonly in vain, will it not be very different from anything in literature or religion?13 But why not study this Sanscrit?14 What if one moon has come and gone with its world of poetry, its weird teachings, its oracular suggestions, so divine a creature freighted with hints for me, and I have not used her?15 One moon gone by unnoticed?16
… Men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if they knew its qualities very well, and despised them; as owls might talk of sunshine.17 None of your sunshine, but this word commonly means merely something which they do not understand, which they are abed and asleep to, however much it may be worth their while to be up and awake to it.18
… Many men walk by day; few walk by night.19 It is a very different season.20 Take a July night, for instance.21 About ten o'clock, when man is asleep, and day fairly forgotten, the beauty of moonlight is seen over lonely pastures where cattle are silently feeding.22 On all sides novelties present themselves.23 Instead of the sun there are the moon and stars, instead of the wood-thrush there is the whip-poor-will, instead of butterflies in the meadows, fire-flies, winged sparks of fire! who would have believed it?24 What kind of cool deliberate life dwells in those dewy abodes associated with a spark of fire?25 So man has fire in his eyes, or blood, or brain.26 Instead of singing birds, the half-throttled note of a cuckoo flying over, the croaking of frogs, and the intenser dream of crickets.27 But above all, the wonderful trump of the bull-frog, ringing from Maine to Georgia.28 The potato-vines stand upright, the corn grows apace, the bushes loom, the grain-fields are boundless.29 On our open river terraces once cultivated by the Indian, they appear to occupy the ground like an army, their heads nodding in the breeze.30
Small trees and shrubs are seen in the midst, overwhelmed as by an inundation.31 The shadows of rocks and trees, and shrubs and hills, are more conspicuous than the objects themselves.32 The slightest irregularities in the ground are revealed by the shadows, and what the feet find comparatively smooth, appears rough and diversified in consequence.33 For the same reason the whole landscape is more variegated and picturesque than by day.34 The smallest recesses in the rocks are dim and cavernous; the ferns in the wood appear of tropical size.35 The sweet fern and indigo in overgrown wood-paths wet you with dew up to your middle.36 The leaves of the shrub-oak are shining as if a liquid were flowing over them.37 The pools seen through the trees are as full of light as the sky.38 “The light of the day takes refuge in their bosoms,” as the Purana says of the ocean.39 All white objects are more remarkable than by day.40 A distant cliff looks like a phosphorescent space on a hillside.41 The woods are heavy and dark.42 Nature slumbers.43 You see the moonlight reflected from particular stumps in the recesses of the forest, as if she selected what to shine on.44 These small fractions of her light remind one of the plant called moon-seed, as if the moon were sowing it in such places.45
In the night the eyes are partly closed or retire into the head.46 Other senses take the lead.47 The walker is guided as well by the sense of smell.48 Every plant and field and forest emits its odor now, swamp-pink in the meadow and tansy in the road; and there is the peculiar dry scent of corn which has begun to show its tassels.49 The senses both of hearing and smelling are more alert.50 We hear the tinkling of rills which we never detected before.51 From time to time, high up on the sides of hills, you pass through a stratum of warm air.52 A blast which has come up from the sultry plains of noon.53 It tells of the day, of sunny noon-tide hours and banks, of the laborer wiping his brow and the bee humming amid flowers.54 It is an air in which work has been done, which men have breathed.55 It circulates about from wood-side to hill-side like a dog that has lost its master, now that the sun is gone.56 The rocks retain all night the warmth of the sun which they have absorbed.57 And so does the sand.58 If you dig a few inches into it you find a warm bed.59 You lie on your back on a rock in a pasture on the top of some bare hill at midnight, and speculate on the height of the starry canopy.60 The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show.61 A companion with whom I was sailing one very windy but bright moonlight night, when the stars were few and faint, thought that a man could get along with them, though he was considerably reduced in his circumstances, that they were a kind of bread and cheese that never failed.62
… It does not concern men who are asleep in their beds, but it is very important to the traveller, whether the moon shines brightly or is obscured.63 It is not easy to realize the serene joy of all the earth, when she commences to shine unobstructedly, unless you have often been abroad alone in moonlight nights.64 She seems to be waging continual war with the clouds in your behalf.65 Yet we fancy the clouds to be her foes also.66 She comes on magnifying her dangers by her light, revealing, displaying them in all their hugeness and blackness, then suddenly casts them behind into the light concealed, and goes her way triumphant through a small space of clear sky.67
In short, the moon traversing, or appearing to traverse, the small clouds which lie in her way, now obscured by them, now easily dissipating and shining through them, makes the drama of the moonlight night to all watchers and night-travellers.68 Sailors speak of it as the moon eating up the clouds.69 The traveller all alone, the moon all alone, except for his sympathy, overcoming with incessant victory whole squadrons of clouds above the forests and lakes and hills.70 When she is obscured he so sympathizes with her that he could whip a dog for her relief, as Indians do.71 When she enters on a clear field of great extent in the heavens, and shines unobstructedly, he is glad.72 And when she has fought her way through all the squadron of her foes, and rides majestic in a clear sky unscathed, and there are no more any obstructions in her path, he cheerfully and confidently pursues his way, and rejoices in his heart, and the cricket also seems to express joy in its song.73
How insupportable would be the days, if the night with its dews and darkness did not come to restore the drooping world.74 As the shades begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of those silent and brooding thoughts which are the natural prey of the intellect.75
… Great restorer of antiquity, great enchanter.76 In a mild night, when the harvest or hunter's moon shines unobstructedly, the houses in our village, whatever architect they may have had by day, acknowledge only a master.77 The village street is then as wild as the forest.78 New and old things are confounded.79 I know not whether I am sitting on the ruins of a wall, or on the material which is to compose a new one.80 Nature is an instructed and impartial teacher, spreading no crude opinions, and flattering none; she will be neither radical nor conservative.81 Consider the moonlight, so civil, yet so savage!82
The light is more proportionate to our knowledge than that of day.83 It is no more dusky in ordinary nights, than our mind's habitual atmosphere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminated moments are.84
… Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?85 to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul?86 It is merely garish and glaring.87
… Nevertheless, even by night the sky is blue and not black, for we see through the shadow of the earth into the distant atmosphere of day, where the sunbeams are revelling.88
Sentence Notes
In plain English: Some years ago I happened to take a memorable walk by moonlight, and I decided to take more such walks and get to know another side of nature. I have done so.
In plain English: The Roman writer Pliny says there is a stone in Arabia called selenite, “containing a white spot that grows and shrinks with the moon.”
Reference & context: Pliny the Elder, Natural History XXXVII. Selenite is a real, pearly form of gypsum; the waxing and waning spot is legend.
In plain English: In that sense, my journal for the past year or two has been moon-stone-like: it has waxed and waned with the moon.
Reference & context: Thoreau kept a huge journal, over two million words; in 1851–54 it is full of moonlight walks.
In plain English: Isn't midnight like Central Africa to most of us, an unexplored land?
Reference & context: In the 1850s European explorers such as Burton, Speke and Livingstone were racing to find the source of the Nile.
In plain English: Aren't we tempted to explore it, to push on to the shores of its Lake Chad and discover the source of its Nile, perhaps in the Mountains of the Moon?
Reference & context: Ptolemy, the ancient geographer, placed the source of the Nile in the “Mountains of the Moon”; the name fits Thoreau's subject perfectly.
In plain English: Who knows what richness and beauty, both moral and natural, might be found there?
In plain English: In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, is where all great rivers have their hidden sources.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The night becomes an unexplored continent, the source of hidden springs of thought.
In plain English: Expeditions up the Nile have so far reached only the rapids, or perhaps the mouth of the White Nile; but it is the Black Nile, the dark one, that interests us.
Reference & context: The Nile has two main branches, the White Nile and the Blue Nile. Thoreau invents a “Black Nile” to stand for the night.
In plain English: I will have done some good if I win some territory from the night, if I can report to the newspapers anything happening around us at night that deserves their attention, if I can show people that some beauty is awake while they sleep, if I can add new lands to poetry.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The language of exploration and conquest is applied to beauty and poetry.
In plain English: Night is certainly newer to us and less ordinary than day.
In plain English: I soon found that I knew only the surface of the night, and as for the moon, I had only glimpsed her now and then, as if through a crack in a shutter.
In plain English: Why not walk a little way by her light?
In plain English: Suppose you paid attention, for one month, to what the moon suggests, which people usually ignore. Wouldn't it be very different from anything in books or religion?
In plain English: So why not study this foreign language?
Reference & context: Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, stands for something difficult but rewarding to learn. Thoreau read Hindu scriptures in translation.
In plain English: What if a whole month's moon has come and gone, with its world of poetry, its strange lessons and its mysterious hints, such a divine being loaded with messages for me, and I haven't made use of her?
In plain English: A whole moon passed by unnoticed?
In plain English: People talk carelessly about “moonshine,” as if they knew all about it and looked down on it, just as owls might talk about sunshine.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The owl, which knows only the night, is as ignorant of daylight as daytime people are of moonlight.
Reference & context: “Moonshine” meant nonsense or foolish fancy. Omitted: a paragraph on the preacher Thomas Chalmers, who wanted ideas he “could see all round.”
In plain English: The word usually just means something they don't understand, something they're in bed and asleep to, however much it might be worth getting up and waking up for.
In plain English: Many people go walking by day; few walk by night.
Reference & context: Omitted: a passage on the moon's influence and on moon-eyed albinos described by an old travel writer.
In plain English: It's a completely different season.
In plain English: Take a July night, for example.
In plain English: Around ten o'clock, when people are asleep and the day is well forgotten, you can see the beauty of moonlight over lonely pastures where cattle are quietly grazing.
In plain English: New things appear on every side.
In plain English: Instead of the sun there are the moon and stars; instead of the wood thrush, the whip-poor-will; instead of butterflies in the meadows, fireflies, flying sparks of fire! Who would have believed it?
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A list of day-and-night swaps builds to the delight of fireflies.
Reference & context: The wood thrush sings at dawn and dusk; the whip-poor-will, a nightjar, calls its name all night.
In plain English: What kind of cool, unhurried life lives in those damp little homes yet carries a spark of fire?
In plain English: In the same way, people have fire in their eyes, blood or brain.
In plain English: Instead of songbirds, there's the half-choked call of a cuckoo flying overhead, the croaking of frogs and the more intense dreamy chirping of crickets.
In plain English: And above all, the wonderful trumpet of the bullfrog, sounding from Maine to Georgia.
In plain English: The potato plants stand up straight, the corn grows fast, the bushes loom up and the grain fields seem endless.
In plain English: On our open riverside terraces, once farmed by Native Americans, the crops seem to hold the ground like an army, their heads nodding in the breeze.
Reference & context: Thoreau collected Native American arrowheads in Concord's fields and was deeply interested in their history.
In plain English: Small trees and bushes can be seen in the middle, as if swamped by a flood.
In plain English: The shadows of rocks, trees, bushes and hills stand out more than the things themselves.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The key insight of night vision: shadows become the main event.
In plain English: The shadows reveal the smallest bumps in the ground, so ground that feels fairly smooth underfoot looks rough and varied.
In plain English: For the same reason, the whole landscape is more patterned and picturesque than by day.
In plain English: The smallest hollows in the rocks look dark and cave-like; the ferns in the woods seem as big as tropical plants.
In plain English: The sweet fern and wild indigo along overgrown woodland paths soak you with dew up to your waist.
In plain English: The leaves of the scrub oak shine as if liquid were flowing over them.
In plain English: The ponds glimpsed through the trees are as full of light as the sky.
In plain English: “The light of day takes shelter in their hearts,” as the Purana says of the ocean.
Reference & context: The Puranas are ancient Hindu sacred texts; Thoreau read the Vishnu Purana in English translation.
In plain English: Everything white stands out more than by day.
In plain English: A distant cliff looks like a glowing patch on a hillside.
In plain English: The woods are heavy and dark.
In plain English: Nature sleeps.
In plain English: You see moonlight bouncing off certain stumps deep in the forest, as if the moon were choosing what to shine on.
In plain English: These little scraps of her light remind you of the plant called moonseed, as if the moon were planting it in those spots.
Reference & context: Moonseed is a North American climbing vine, named for its crescent-shaped seeds.
In plain English: At night the eyes half close or withdraw into the head.
In plain English: The other senses take over.
In plain English: The walker is guided by smell, too.
In plain English: Every plant, field and forest gives off its scent now: swamp pink in the meadow, tansy by the road, and the special dry smell of corn that has started to grow tassels.
In plain English: Both hearing and smell are sharper.
In plain English: We hear the trickling of little streams we never noticed before.
In plain English: Now and then, high up on the hillsides, you walk through a layer of warm air.
In plain English: It's a breath of air that has risen from the hot plains of midday.
In plain English: It speaks of the day: of sunny noon hours and sunny slopes, of the farmhand wiping his forehead and the bee humming among flowers.
In plain English: It's air in which work has been done, air that people have breathed.
In plain English: Now that the sun has gone, it wanders from the edge of the woods to the hillside like a dog that has lost its owner.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A tender, surprising simile: the leftover warm air pines for the sun like a lost dog.
In plain English: The rocks keep the sun's warmth all night.
In plain English: So does the sand.
In plain English: Dig a few inches down and you find a warm bed.
In plain English: At midnight you lie on your back on a rock in a hilltop pasture and wonder how high the starry roof is.
In plain English: The stars are the night's jewels, and perhaps outshine anything the day can offer.
In plain English: A friend I was sailing with one very windy but bright moonlit night, when only a few faint stars showed, said that a person could get by on the stars even if he were very poor: they were a kind of bread and cheese that never ran out.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Stars as everyday food: the humble image makes the spiritual point concrete.
Reference & context: Probably his friend the poet William Ellery Channing, who often walked and boated with Thoreau.
In plain English: It doesn't matter to people asleep in bed, but it matters a great deal to the traveller whether the moon is shining brightly or hidden.
Reference & context: Omitted: quotations from Du Bartas, Sir Walter Raleigh and others on the influence of the stars.
In plain English: Unless you've often been out alone on moonlit nights, it's hard to imagine the calm joy of the whole earth when the moon begins to shine with nothing in her way.
In plain English: She seems to be fighting an endless war against the clouds on your behalf.
In plain English: But we imagine the clouds are her enemies too.
In plain English: She advances, making her dangers look bigger with her own light, showing them off in all their size and blackness; then suddenly she throws them behind her, edged with hidden light, and sails on in triumph through a small patch of clear sky.
In plain English: In short, the moon crossing (or seeming to cross) the small clouds in her path, sometimes hidden by them, sometimes easily breaking through and shining past them, is the drama of a moonlit night for everyone who watches or travels at night.
In plain English: Sailors call this the moon eating up the clouds.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A vivid folk expression, quoted for its freshness.
In plain English: The traveller is all alone, and the moon is all alone except for his sympathy, as she wins victory after victory over whole squadrons of clouds above the forests, lakes and hills.
In plain English: When she's hidden he feels for her so much that he could beat a dog to help her, as some Native Americans do.
Reference & context: Thoreau refers to a reported custom of making dogs howl during an eclipse to frighten away whatever was devouring the moon.
In plain English: When she moves into a wide clear stretch of sky and shines freely, he is glad.
In plain English: And when she has battled through the whole enemy fleet and rides grandly and unharmed in a clear sky, with nothing more in her way, he walks on cheerfully and confidently, glad at heart, and the cricket seems to sing for joy too.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The moon's journey becomes an epic battle, and the walker's mood rises with her victory.
In plain English: How unbearable the days would be if night, with its dew and darkness, didn't come to refresh the wilting world.
In plain English: As the shadows gather, our oldest instincts wake up, and like jungle animals we creep out of our dens to hunt for those quiet, brooding thoughts that are the mind's natural prey.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Thinking pictured as a night-time hunt.
In plain English: The moon is a great restorer of the past, a great magician.
Reference & context: Omitted: quotations from the German writer Jean Paul Richter and from poems about the moon goddess Diana.
In plain English: On a mild night, when the harvest moon or hunter's moon shines with nothing in its way, the houses of our village, whoever designed them by day, recognize only one master builder.
Reference & context: The harvest moon is the full moon nearest the autumn equinox; the hunter's moon is the next one.
In plain English: Then the village street is as wild as the forest.
In plain English: New things and old things are jumbled together.
In plain English: I can't tell whether I'm sitting on the ruins of an old wall or on the materials for a new one.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Moonlight erases the difference between past and future.
In plain English: Nature is a learned and fair teacher who spreads no crude opinions and flatters no one; she takes neither the radical side nor the conservative side.
Reference & context: Compare Emerson's “The Conservative” (no. 47). Emerson was Thoreau's friend and mentor.
In plain English: Think of moonlight: so gentle and civilized, yet so wild!
In plain English: Moonlight matches the amount we actually know better than daylight does.
In plain English: On ordinary nights it is no dimmer than the usual state of our minds, and moonlight is as bright as our most enlightened moments.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Thoreau's humility: our minds usually see only by moonlight.
In plain English: What does daylight mean if it doesn't reflect a sunrise inside us?
In plain English: What's the point of the night's veil being lifted if the morning shows the soul nothing?
In plain English: Then it is just harsh and glaring.
In plain English: Still, even at night the sky is blue, not black, because we are looking through the earth's shadow into the far-off daylit air where the sunbeams are celebrating.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The last sentence joins night and day: even darkness holds a hint of distant light.
Reference & context: Omitted: a passage quoting Ossian's address to the sun.
Fun Fact
Thoreau was a surveyor by trade, and he once surveyed Walden Pond in winter by cutting more than a hundred holes through the ice to measure its depth. People had claimed the pond was bottomless; he found it was about 102 feet deep, a figure modern surveys have confirmed almost exactly.