The stars began to crumble

'His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys, and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless . . . '

He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley's fragment. . . .

The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward. What music' The music came nearer and he recalled the words, the words of Shelley's fragment upon the moon wandering companioness, pale for weariness. The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space.'

'James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916.