II.—Bright Clouds on a Dark Night Sky

On a moonless night, whenever clouds of an ordinary elevation in the atmosphere appear upon, or pass across, the star-spangled sky behind them, they exhibit themselves, as a rule, dark, sometimes even black, in comparison therewith. And no wonder, when every part of the open sky from visible star to visible star therein must be lit up to some, though doubtless a very small, extent by the faintest general and cumulative radiance of those myriads and myriads of lesser stars, which only a large telescope can show to be individually existent as actual stellar points of light, but in their aggregate more nearly eternal, and still more constant from age to age, than our gigantic Sun itself.