Cosmos - pg. 157

I looked all round. What a spectacle. Mountains projecting themselves blindly into the expanse of the sky, on which centaurs, swans, ships, lions with shining manes, were navigating and below a ballet of hills and woods enveloped in tremulous whiteness. Oh, the moon, a dead sphere shining with borrowed light; its second-hand, weakened, nocturnal glow was as contaminating and poisonous as an illness. And the constellations were unreal, artificial, imposed; they were the obsessions of the luminous sky.