Page 192 - Third Book of Reading Lessons

READING LESSONS. 191
LESSON XV.
THE CROSS OF THE SOUTH.
THE pleasure we lt in discovering the constllation, called the Southern Cross, was warmly shared by such of the crew as had lived in the colonies. In the solitude of the sea, we hail a star, as a iend from \vho we have been long separated. Among the Portuguese and Spaniards, peculiar motives seem to increase this eling; a religious sentiment attaches them to a constellation, the rm of which recalls the sign of the ith planted by their ances­ tors in the deserts of the New World. The two great stars which mark the summit and the foot of the cross, having nearly the same right ascension, it llows that the constellation is almost perpendicular at the moment when it passes the meridian. This circumstance is known to every nation that lies beyond the tropics, or in the south­ ern hemisphere. It has been observed at what hour of
the night,_ in di erent seasons, the Cross of the South is erect or inclined. It is a time-piece, that dvances very regularly nearly ur minutes a day, and no other group of stars exhibits, to the naked eye, an observation of time so easily made. How often have we heard our guides exclaim in the savannahs of Venezuela, or in the desert extending om Lima to Truxillo, "_Midnight is past; the Cross begins to bend !"-HuMBOLDT's TRAVELS.
1. the silence and grandeur of midnight I tread,
j Where sava. nnahs in boundless magni cence spread, A nd bearing sublimely their snow-wreaths on high,
j The far Cordilleras unite with the sky.
I 2. The fern-tree waves o'er me, the re- y's red light, 1 Withitsquick-glancingsplendour,illuminesthenight,