Chaucer calls it "Watling street":
See yonder, lo! the galaxie,
The which men clepe the Milky Way
For it is white; and some parfay
Callen it Watling streete."
This great street was "brent with hete," he goes on to say, when the "Sunne's sonne" lost control of the sun-chariot, "that he could no governaunce." In Germany this same street was called "Irmin's Way," for the Saxon God Irmin was believed to ride along here in a ponderous brazen chariot now seen in the constellation of the Great Bear.
In 1609 Galileo, the distinguished Italian astronomer, turned his newly invented telescope toward this mysterious illuminated arch, and saw, to his delight, that it was a "track of countless stars." This fact, which he proclaimed to the world, has even more lure for the imaginative mind than a "road whose dust is gold." A modern poet describes it as
the worlds like flowers about God's feet."
Thus the cold glass eye of the telescope does not, like the eye of the Medusa, turn a singing heart into stone. Some of the early writers, such as Ovid, evidently suspected that the Milky Way consisted of millions of distant stars, but the suggestion did not take well with the mass of people who preferred the belief that it was a radiant stairway used by the angels.
The "silvery glow," which is such an attractive feature of the star stream, is caused by the accumulated light of a dazzling torrent of stars. These stars, or suns, are so unthinkably distant that their individuality is lost like particles of mist, thus causing
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