CONTENTS OF VOLUME II.

SYSTEM OF THE HEAVENS AS REVEALED BY LORD ROSSE'S TELESCOPES

MODERN SUPERSTITION

COLERIDGE AND OPIUM-EATING

TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT

ON WAR

THE LAST DAYS OF IMMANUEL KANT

SYSTEM OF THE HEAVENS AS REVEALED BY LORD ROSSE'S TELESCOPES.

[Footnote: Thoughts on Some Important Points relating to the System of

the World. By J. P. Nichol, LL.D., Professor of Astronomy in the

University of Glasgow. William Tait, Edinburgh. 1846.]

Some years ago, some person or other, [in fact I believe it was

myself,] published a paper from the German of Kant, on a very

interesting question, viz., the age of our own little Earth. Those who

have never seen that paper, a class of unfortunate people whom I

suspect to form _rather_ the majority in our present perverse

generation, will be likely to misconceive its object. Kant's purpose

was, not to ascertain how many years the Earth had lived: a million of

years, more or less, made very little difference to _him_. What he

wished to settle was no such barren conundrum. For, had there even been

any means of coercing the Earth into an honest answer, on such a

delicate point, which the Sicilian canon, Recupero, fancied that there

was; [Footnote: _Recupero_. See Brydone's Travels, some sixty or

seventy years ago. The canon, being a beneficed clergyman in the Papal

church, was naturally an infidel. He wished exceedingly to refute

Moses: and he fancied that he really had done so by means of some

collusive assistance from the layers of lava on Mount Etna. But there

survives, at this day, very little to remind us of the canon, except an

unpleasant guffaw that rises, at times, in solitary valleys of Etna.]

but which, in my own opinion, there neither is, nor ought to be,--

(since a man deserves to be cudgelled who could put such improper

questions to a _lady_ planet,)--still what would it amount to?

What good would it do us to have a certificate of our dear little

mother's birth and baptism? Other people--people in Jupiter, or the

Uranians--may amuse themselves with her pretended foibles or

infirmities: it is quite safe to do so at _their_ distance; and,

in a female planet like Venus, it might be natural, (though, strictly

speaking, not quite correct,) to scatter abroad malicious insinuations,

as though our excellent little mamma had begun to wear false hair, or

had lost some of her front teeth. But all this, we men of sense know to

be gammon. Our mother Tellus, beyond all doubt, is a lovely little

thing. I am satisfied that she is very much admired throughout the

Solar System: and, in clear seasons, when she is seen to advantage,

with her bonny wee pet of a Moon tripping round her like a lamb, I

should be thankful to any gentleman who will mention where he has

happened to observe--either he or his telescope--will he only have the

goodness to say, in what part of the heavens he has discovered a more

elegant turn-out. I wish to make no personal reflections. I name no

names. Only this I say, that, though some people have the gift of

seeing things that other people never could see, and though some other

people, or other some people are born with a silver spoon in their

mouths, so that, generally, their geese count for swans, yet, after

all, swans or geese, it would be a pleasure to me, and really a

curiosity, to see the planet that could fancy herself entitled to

sneeze at our Earth. And then, if she (viz., our Earth,) keeps but one

Moon, even _that_ (you know) is an advantage as regards some

people that keep none. There are people, pretty well known to you and

me, that can't make it convenient to keep even one Moon. And so I come

to my moral; which is this, that, to all appearance, it is mere

justice; but, supposing it were not, still it is _our_ duty, (as

children of the Earth,) right or wrong, to stand up for our bonny young

mamma, if she _is_ young; or for our dear old mother, if she

_is_ old; whether young or old, to take her part against all

comers; and to argue through thick and thin, which (sober or not) I

always attempt to do, that she is the most respectable member of the

Copernican System.

Meantime, what Kant understood by being old, is something that still

remains to be explained. If one stumbled, in the steppes of Tartary, on

the grave of a Megalonyx, and, after long study, had deciphered from

some pre-Adamite heiro-pothooks, the following epitaph:--'_Hic

jacet_ a Megalonyx, or _Hic jacet_ a Mammoth, (as the case

might be,) who departed this life, to the grief of his numerous

acquaintance in the seventeen thousandth year of his age,'--of course,

one would be sorry for him; because it must be disagreeable at

_any_ age to be torn away from life, and from all one's little

megalonychal comforts; that's not pleasant, you know, even if one

_is_ seventeen thousand years old. But it would make all the

difference possible in your grief, whether the record indicated a

premature death, that he had been cut off, in fact, whilst just

stepping into life, or had kicked the bucket when full of honors, and

been followed to the grave by a train of weeping grandchildren. He had

died 'in his teens,' that's past denying. But still we must know to

what stage of life in a man, had corresponded seventeen thousand years

in a Mammoth. Now exactly this was what Kant desired to know about our

planet. Let her have lived any number of years that you suggest, (shall

we say if you please, that she is in her billionth year?) still that

tells us nothing about the _period_ of life, the _stage_, which she may

be supposed to have reached. Is she a child, in fact, or is she an

adult? And, _if_ an adult, and that you gave a ball to the Solar

System, is she that kind of person, that you would introduce to a

waltzing partner, some fiery young gentlemen like Mars, or would

you rather suggest to her the sort of partnership which takes place at

a whist-table? On this, as on so many other questions, Kant was

perfectly sensible that people, of the finest understandings, may and

do take the most opposite views. Some think that our planet is in that

stage of her life, which corresponds to the playful period of twelve or

thirteen in a spirited girl. Such a girl, were it not that she is

checked by a sweet natural sense of feminine grace, you might call a

romp; but not a hoyden, observe; no horse-play; oh, no, nothing of that

sort. And these people fancy that earthquakes, volcanoes, and all such

little _escapades_ will be over, they will, in lawyer's phrase,

'cease and determine,' as soon as our Earth reaches the age of maidenly

bashfulness. Poor thing! It's quite natural, you know, in a healthy

growing girl. A little overflow of vivacity, a _pirouette_ more or

less, what harm should _that_ do to any of us? Nobody takes more

delight than I in the fawn-like sportiveness of an innocent girl, at

this period of life: even a shade of _espièglerie_ does not annoy

me. But still my own impressions incline me rather to represent the

Earth as a fine noble young woman, full of the pride which is so

becoming to her sex, and well able to take her own part, in case that,

at any solitary point of the heavens, she should come across one of

those vulgar fussy Comets, disposed to be rude and take improper

liberties. These Comets, by the way, are public nuisances, very much

like the mounted messengers of butchers in great cities, who are always

at full gallop, and moving upon such an infinity of angles to human

shinbones, that the final purpose of such boys (one of whom lately had

the audacity nearly to ride down the Duke of Wellington) seems to be--

not the translation of mutton, which would certainly find its way into

human mouths even if riding boys were not,--but the improved geometry

of transcendental curves. They ought to be numbered, ought these boys,

and to wear badges--X 10, &c. And exactly the same evil, asking

therefore by implication for exactly the same remedy, affects the

Comets. A respectable planet is known everywhere, and responsible for

any mischief that he does. But if a cry should arise, 'Stop that

wretch, who was rude to the Earth: who is he?' twenty voices will

answer, perhaps, 'It's Encke's Comet; he is always doing mischief;'

well, what can you say? it _may_ be Encke's, it may be some other

man's Comet; there are so many abroad and on so many roads, that you

might as well ask upon a night of fog, such fog as may be opened with

an oyster knife, whose cab that was (whose, viz., out of 27,000 in

London) that floored you into the kennel.

These are constructive ideas upon the Earth's stage of evolution, which

Kant was aware of, and which will always find toleration, even where

they do not find patronage. But others there are, a class whom I

perfectly abominate, that place our Earth in the category of decaying

women, nay of decayed women, going, going, and all but gone. 'Hair like

arctic snows, failure of vital heat, palsy that shakes the head as in

the porcelain toys on our mantel-pieces, asthma that shakes the whole

fabric--these they absolutely fancy themselves to _see_. They

absolutely _hear_ the tellurian lungs wheezing, panting, crying,

'Bellows to mend!' periodically as the Earth approaches her aphelion.

But suddenly at this point a demur arises upon the total question.

Kant's very problem explodes, bursts, as poison in Venetian wine-glass

of old shivered the glass into fragments. For is there, after all, any

stationary meaning in the question? Perhaps in reality the Earth is

both young and old. Young? If she is not young at present, perhaps she

_will_ be so in future. Old? if she is not old at this moment,

perhaps she _has_ been old, and has a fair chance of becoming so

again. In fact, she is a Phoenix that is known to have secret processes

for rebuilding herself out of her own ashes. Little doubt there is but

she has seen many a birthday, many a funeral night, and many a morning

of resurrection. Where now the mightiest of oceans rolls in pacific

beauty, once were anchored continents and boundless forests. Where the

south pole now shuts her frozen gates inhospitably against the

intrusions of flesh, once were probably accumulated the ribs of

empires; man's imperial forehead, woman's roseate lips, gleamed upon

ten thousand hills; and there were innumerable contributions to

antarctic journals almost as good (but not quite) as our own. Even

within our domestic limits, even where little England, in her south-

eastern quarter now devolves so quietly to the sea her sweet pastoral

rivulets, once came roaring down, in pomp of waters, a regal Ganges

[Footnote: _'Ganges:'_--Dr. Nichol calls it by this name for the

purpose of expressing its grandeur; and certainly in breadth, in

diffusion at all times, but especially in the rainy season, the Ganges

is the cock of the walk in our British orient. Else, as regards the

body of water discharged, the absolute payments made into the sea's

exchequer, and the majesty of column riding downwards from the

Himalaya, I believe that, since Sir Alexander Burnes's measurements,

the Indus ranks foremost by a long chalk.], that drained some

hyperbolical continent, some Quinbus Flestrin of Asiatic proportions,

long since gone to the dogs. All things pass away. Generations wax old

as does a garment: but eternally God says:--'Come again, ye children of

men.' Wildernesses of fruit, and worlds of flowers, are annually

gathered in solitary South America to ancestral graves: yet still the

Pomona of Earth, yet still the Flora of Earth, does not become

superannuated, but blossoms in everlasting youth. Not otherwise by

secular periods, known to us geologically as facts, though obscure as

durations, _Tellus_ herself, the planet, as a whole, is for ever

working by golden balances of change and compensation, of ruin and

restoration. She recasts her glorious habitations in decomposing them;

she lies down for death, which perhaps a thousand times she has

suffered; she rises for a new birth, which perhaps for the thousandth

time has glorified her disc. Hers is the wedding garment, hers is the

shroud, that eternally is being woven in the loom. And God imposes upon

her the awful necessity of working for ever at her own grave, yet of

listening for ever to his far-off trumpet of _palingenesis_.

If this account of the matter be just, and were it not treasonable to

insinuate the possibility of an error against so great a swell as

Immanuel Kant, one would be inclined to fancy that Mr. Kant had really

been dozing a little on this occasion; or, agreeably to his own

illustration elsewhere, that he had realized the pleasant picture of

one learned doctor trying to milk a he-goat, whilst another doctor,

equally learned, holds the milk-pail below. [Footnote: Kant applied

this illustration to the case where one worshipful scholar proposes

some impossible problem, (as the squaring of the circle, or the

perpetual motion,) which another worshipful scholar sits down to solve.

The reference was of course to Virgil's line,--'Atque idem jungat

vulpes, et _mulgeat hircos_.'] And there is apparently this two-

edged embarrassment pressing upon the case--that, if our dear excellent

mother the Earth could be persuaded to tell us her exact age in Julian

years, still _that_ would leave us all as much in the dark as

ever: since, if the answer were, 'Why, children, at my next birth-day I

shall count a matter of some million centuries,' we should still be at

a loss to _value_ her age: would it mean that she was a mere

chicken, or that she was 'getting up in years?' On the other hand, if

(declining to state any odious circumstantialities,) she were to

reply,--'No matter, children, for my precise years, which are

disagreeable remembrances; I confess generally to being a lady of a

certain age,'--here, in the inverse order, given the _valuation_

of the age, we should yet be at a loss for the _absolute_ years

numerically: would a 'certain age,' mean that 'mamma' was a million, be

the same more or less, or perhaps not much above seventy thousand?

Every way, you see, reader, there are difficulties. But two things used

to strike me, as unaccountably overlooked by Kant; who, to say the

truth, was profound--yet at no time very agile--in the character of his

understanding. First, what age now might we take our brother and sister

planets to be? For _that_ determination as to a point in

_their_ constitution, will do something to illustrate our own. We

are as good as they, I hope, any day: perhaps in a growl, one might

modestly insinuate--_better_. It's not at all likely that there

can be any great disproportion of age amongst children of the same

household: and therefore, since Kant always countenanced the idea that

Jupiter had not quite finished the upholstery of his extensive

premises, as a comfortable residence for a man, Jupiter having, in

fact, a fine family of mammoths, but no family at all of 'humans,' (as

brother Jonathan calls them,) Kant was bound, _ex analogo_, to

hold that any little precedency in the trade of living, on the part of

our own mother Earth, could not count for much in the long run. At

Newmarket, or Doncaster, the start is seldom mathematically true:

trifling advantages will survive all human trials after abstract

equity; and the logic of this case argues, that any few thousands of

years by which Tellus may have got ahead of Jupiter, such as the having

finished her Roman Empire, finished her Crusades, and finished her

French Revolution, virtually amounts to little or nothing; indicates no

higher proportion to the total scale upon which she has to run, than

the few tickings of a watch by which one horse at the start for the

Leger is in advance of another. When checked in our chronology by each

other, it transpires that, in effect, we are but executing the nice

manoeuvre of a start; and that the small matter of six thousand years,

by which we may have advanced our own position beyond some of our

planetary rivals, is but the outstretched neck of an uneasy horse at

Doncaster. This is _one_ of the data overlooked by Kant; and the

less excusably overlooked, because it was his own peculiar doctrine,--

that uncle Jupiter ought to be considered a greenhorn. Jupiter may be a

younger brother of our mamma; but, if he is a brother at all, he cannot

be so very wide of our own chronology; and therefore the first

_datum_ overlooked by Kant was--the analogy of our whole planetary

system. A second datum, as it always occurred to myself, might

reasonably enough be derived from the intellectual vigor of us men. If

our mother could, with any show of reason, be considered an old decayed

lady, snoring stentorously in her arm-chair, there would naturally be

some _aroma_ of phthisis, or apoplexy, beginning to form about

_us_, that are her children. But _is_ there? If ever Dr. Johnson

said a true word, it was when he replied to the Scottish judge

Burnett, so well known to the world as Lord Monboddo. The judge, a

learned man, but obstinate as a mule in certain prejudices, had said

plaintively, querulously, piteously,--'Ah, Doctor, we are poor

creatures, we men of the eighteenth century, by comparison with our

forefathers!' 'Oh, no, my Lord,' said Johnson, 'we are quite as strong

as our ancestors, and a great deal wiser.' Yes; our kick is, at least,

as dangerous, and our logic does three times as much execution. This

would be a complex topic to treat effectively; and I wish merely to

indicate the opening which it offers for a most decisive order of

arguments in such a controversy. If the Earth were on her last legs, we

her children could not be very strong or healthy. Whereas, if there

were less pedantry amongst us, less malice, less falsehood, and less

darkness of prejudice, easy it would be to show, that in almost every

mode of intellectual power, we are more than a match for the most

conceited of elder generations, and that in some modes we have energies

or arts absolutely and exclusively our own. Amongst a thousand

indications of strength and budding youth, I will mention two:--Is it

likely, is it plausible, that our Earth should just begin to find out

effective methods of traversing land and sea, when she had a summons to

leave both? Is it not, on the contrary, a clear presumption that the

great career of earthly nations is but on the point of opening, that

life is but just beginning to kindle, when the great obstacles to

effectual locomotion, and therefore to extensive human intercourse, are

first of all beginning to give way? Secondly, I ask peremptorily,--Does

it stand with good sense, is it reasonable that Earth is waning,

science drooping, man looking downward, precisely in that epoch when,

first of all, man's eye is arming itself for looking effectively into

the mighty depths of space? A new era for the human intellect, upon a

path that lies amongst its most aspiring, is promised, is inaugurated,

by Lord Rosse's almost awful telescope.

What is it then that Lord Rosse has accomplished? If a man were aiming

at dazzling by effects of rhetoric, he might reply: He has accomplished

that which once the condition of the telescope not only refused its

permission to hope for, but expressly bade man to despair of. What is

it that Lord Rosse has revealed? Answer: he has revealed more by far

than he found. The theatre to which he has introduced us, is

_immeasurably_ beyond the old one which he found. To say that he

found, in the visible universe, a little wooden theatre of Thespis, a

_tréteau_ or shed of vagrants, and that he presented us, at a

price of toil and of _anxiety_ that cannot be measured, with a

Roman colosseum,--_that_ is to say nothing. It is to undertake the

measurement of the tropics with the pocket-tape of an upholsterer.

Columbus, when he introduced the Old World to the New, after all that

can be said in his praise, did in fact only introduce the majority to

the minority; but Lord Rosse has introduced the minority to the

majority. There are two worlds, one called Ante-Rosse, and the other

Post-Rosse; and, if it should come to voting, the latter would

shockingly outvote the other. Augustus Cæsar made it his boast when

dying, that he had found the city of Rome built of brick, and that he

left it built of marble: _lateritiam invenit, marmoream reliquit_.

Lord Rosse may say, even if to-day he should die, 'I found God's

universe represented for human convenience, even after all the sublime

discoveries of Herschel, upon a globe or spherical chart having a

radius of one hundred and fifty feet; and I left it sketched upon a

similar chart, keeping exactly the same scale of proportions, but now

elongating its radius into one thousand feet.' The reader of course

understands that this expression, founded on absolute calculations of

Dr. Nichol, is simply meant to exhibit the _relative_ dimensions

of the _mundus Ante-Rosseanus_ and the _mundus Post-Rosseanus;_

for as to the _absolute_ dimensions, when stated in miles, leagues

or any units familiar to the human experience, they are too stunning

and confounding. If, again, they are stated in larger units, as for

instance diameters of the earth's orbit, the unit itself that

should facilitate the grasping of the result, and which really

_is_ more manageable numerically, becomes itself elusive of the

mental grasp: it comes in as an interpreter; and (as in some other

cases) the interpreter is hardest to be understood of the two. If,

finally, TIME be assumed as the exponent of the dreadful magnitudes,

time combining itself with motion, as in the flight of cannon-balls or

the flight of swallows, the sublimity becomes greater; but horror

seizes upon the reflecting intellect, and incredulity upon the

irreflective. Even a railroad generation, that _should_ have faith

in the miracles of velocity, lifts up its hands with an '_Incredulus

odi_!' we know that Dr. Nichol speaks the truth; but he _seems_

to speak falsehood. And the ignorant by-stander prays that the doctor

may have grace given him and time for repentance; whilst his more

liberal companion reproves his want of charity, observing that

travellers into far countries have always had a license for lying, as a

sort of tax or fine levied for remunerating their own risks; and that

great astronomers, as necessarily far travellers into space, are

entitled to a double per centage of the same Munchausen privilege.

Great is the mystery of Space, greater is the mystery of Time; either

mystery grows upon man, as man himself grows; and either seems to be a

function of the godlike which is in man. In reality the depths and the

heights which are in man, the depths by which he searches, the heights

by which he aspires, are but projected and made objective externally in

the three dimensions of space which are outside of him. He trembles at

the abyss into which his bodily eyes look down, or look up; not knowing

that abyss to be, not always consciously suspecting it to be, but by an

instinct written in his prophetic heart feeling it to be, boding it to

be, fearing it to be, and sometimes hoping it to be, the mirror to a

mightier abyss that will one day be expanded in himself. Even as to the

sense of space, which is the lesser mystery than time, I know not

whether the reader has remarked that it is one which swells upon man

with the expansion of his mind, and that it is probably peculiar to the

mind of man. An infant of a year old, or oftentimes even older, takes

no notice of a sound, however loud, which is a quarter of a mile

removed, or even in a distant chamber. And brutes, even of the most

enlarged capacities, seem not to have any commerce with distance:

distance is probably not revealed to them except by a _presence_,

viz., by some shadow of their own animality, which, if perceived at

all, is perceived as a thing _present_ to their organs. An animal

desire, or a deep animal hostility, may render sensible a distance

which else would not be sensible; but not render it sensible _as_

a distance. Hence perhaps is explained, and not out of any self-

oblivion from higher enthusiasm, a fact that often has occurred, of

deer, or hares, or foxes, and the pack of hounds in pursuit, chaser and

chased, all going headlong over a precipice together. Depth or height

does not readily manifest itself to _them_; so that any _strong_ motive

is sufficient to overpower the sense of it. Man only has a natural

function for expanding on an illimitable sensorium, the illimitable

growths of space. Man, coming to the precipice, reads his danger; the

brute perishes: man is saved; and the horse is saved by his rider.

But, if this sounds in the ear of some a doubtful refinement, the doubt

applies only to the lowest degrees of space. For the highest, it is

certain that brutes have no perception. To man is as much reserved the

prerogative of perceiving space in its higher extensions, as of

geometrically constructing the relations of space. And the brute is no

more capable of apprehending abysses through his eye, than he can build

upwards or can analyze downwards the ærial synthesis of Geometry. Such,

therefore, as is space for the grandeur of man's perceptions, such as

is space for the benefit of man's towering mathematic speculations,

such is the nature of our debt to Lord Rosse--as being the philosopher

who has most pushed back the frontiers of our conquests upon this

_exclusive_ inheritance of man. We have all heard of a king that,

sitting on the sea-shore, bade the waves, as they began to lave his

feet, upon their allegiance to retire. _That_ was said not vainly

or presumptuously, but in reproof of sycophantic courtiers. Now,

however, we see in good earnest another man, wielding another kind of

sceptre, and sitting upon the shores of infinity, that says to the ice

which had frozen up our progress,--'Melt thou before my breath!' that

says to the rebellious _nebulæ_,--'Submit, and burst into blazing

worlds!' that says to the gates of darkness,--'Roll back, ye barriers,

and no longer hide from us the infinities of God!'

'Come, and I will show you what is beautiful.'

From the days of infancy still lingers in my ears this opening of a

prose hymn by a lady, then very celebrated, viz., the late Mrs.

Barbauld. The hymn began by enticing some solitary infant into some

silent garden, I believe, or some forest lawn; and the opening words

were, 'Come, and I will show you what is beautiful!' Well, and what

beside? There is nothing beside; oh, disappointed and therefore enraged

reader; positively this is the sum-total of what I can recall from the

wreck of years; and certainly it is not much. Even of Sappho, though

time has made mere ducks and drakes of her lyrics, we have rather more

spared to us than this. And yet this trifle, simple as you think it,

this shred of a fragment, if the reader will believe me, still echoes

with luxurious sweetness in my ears, from some unaccountable hide-and-

seek of fugitive childish memories; just as a marine shell, if applied

steadily to the ear, awakens (according to the fine image of Landor

[Footnote: 'Of Landor,' viz., in his 'Gebir;' but also of Wordsworth in

'The Excursion.' And I must tell the reader, that a contest raged at

one time as to the _original property_ in this image, not much

less keen than that between Neptune and Minerva, for the chancellorship

of Athens.]) the great vision of the sea; places the listener

'In the sun's palace-porch,

And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.'

Now, on some moonless night, in some fitting condition of the

atmosphere, if Lord Rosse would permit the reader and myself to walk

into the front drawing-room of his telescope, then, in Mrs. Barbauld's

words, slightly varied, I might say to him,--Come, and I will show you

what is sublime! In fact, what I am going to lay before him, from Dr.

Nichol's work, is, or at least _would_ be, (when translated into

Hebrew grandeur by the mighty telescope,) a step above even that object

which some four-and-twenty years ago in the British Museum struck me as

simply the sublimest sight which in this sight-seeing world I had seen.

It was the Memnon's head, then recently brought from Egypt. I looked at

it, as the reader must suppose, in order to understand the depth which

I have here ascribed to the impression, not as a human but as a

symbolic head; and what it symbolized to me were: 1. The peace which

passeth all understanding. 2. The eternity which baffles and confounds

all faculty of computation; the eternity which _had_ been, the

eternity which _was_ to be. 3. The diffusive love, not such as

rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality, not such as sinks and

swells by undulations of time, but a procession--an emanation from some

mystery of endless dawn. You durst not call it a smile that radiated

from the lips; the radiation was too awful to clothe itself in

adumbrations or memorials of flesh.

In _that mode_ of sublimity, perhaps, I still adhere to my first

opinion, that nothing so great was ever beheld. The atmosphere for

_this_, for the Memnon, was the breathlessness which belongs to a

saintly trance; the holy thing seemed to live by silence. But there

_is_ a picture, the pendant of the Memnon, there _is_ a dreadful

cartoon, from the gallery which has begun to open upon Lord Rosse's

telescope, where the appropriate atmosphere for investing it

must be drawn from another silence, from the frost and from the

eternities of death. It is the famous _nebula_ in the constellation

of Orion; famous for the unexampled defiance with which it resisted

all approaches from the most potent of former telescopes; famous

for its frightful magnitude and for the frightful depth to which

it is sunk in the abysses of the heavenly wilderness; famous just now

for the submission with which it has begun to render up its secrets to

the all-conquering telescope; and famous in all time coming for the

horror of the regal phantasma which it has perfected to eyes of flesh.

Had Milton's 'incestuous mother,' with her fleshless son, and with the

warrior angel, his father, that led the rebellions of heaven, been

suddenly unmasked by Lord Rosse's instrument, in these dreadful

distances before which, simply as expressions of resistance, the mind

of man shudders and recoils, there would have been nothing more

appalling in the exposure; in fact, it would have been essentially the

same exposure: the same expression of power in the detestable phantom,

the same rebellion in the attitude, the same pomp of malice in the

features to a universe seasoned for its assaults.

The reader must look to Dr. Nichol's book, at page 51, for the picture

of this abominable apparition. But then, in order to see what _I_

see, the obedient reader must do what I tell him to do. Let him

therefore view the wretch upside down. If he neglects that simple

direction, of course I don't answer for anything that follows: without

any fault of mine, my description will be unintelligible. This

inversion being made, the following is the dreadful creature that will

then reveal itself.

_Description of the Nebula in Orion, as forced to show out by Lord

Rosse._--You see a head thrown back, and raising its face, (or eyes,

if eyes it had,) in the very anguish of hatred, to some unknown

heavens. What _should_ be its skull wears what _might_ be an

Assyrian tiara, only ending behind in a floating train. This head rests

upon a beautifully developed neck and throat. All power being given to

the awful enemy, he is beautiful where he pleases, in order to point

and envenom his ghostly ugliness. The mouth, in that stage of the

apocalypse which Sir John Herschel was able to arrest in his eighteen-

inch mirror, is amply developed. Brutalities unspeakable sit upon the

upper lip, which is confluent with a snout; for separate nostrils there

are none. Were it not for this one defect of nostrils; and, even in

spite of this defect, (since, in so mysterious a mixture of the angelic

and the brutal, we may suppose the sense of odor to work by some

compensatory organ,) one is reminded by the phantom's attitude of a

passage, ever memorable, in Milton: that passage, I mean, where Death

first becomes aware, soon after the original trespass, of his own

future empire over man. The 'meagre shadow' even smiles (for the first

time and the last) on apprehending his own abominable bliss, by

apprehending from afar the savor 'of mortal change on earth.'

----'Such a scent,' (he says,) 'I draw

Of carnage, prey innumerable.'

As illustrating the attitude of the phantom in Orion, let the reader

allow me to quote the tremendous passage:--

'So saying, with delight he snuff'd the smell

Of mortal change on earth. As when a flock

Of ravenous fowl, though many a league remote,

Against the day of battle, to a field,

Where armies lie encamp'd, come flying, lured

With scent of living carcasses design'd

For death, the following day, in bloody fight;

So scented the grim feature, [Footnote: 'So scented the grim

feature,' [_feature_ is the old word for _form or outline that

is shadowy_; and also for form (shadowy or not) which abstracts from

the _matter_.] By the way, I have never seen it noticed, that

Milton was indebted for the hint of this immortal passage to a superb

line-and-a-half, in Lucan's Pharsalia.] and upturn'd

His nostril wide into the murky air,

Sagacious of his quarry from so far.'

But the lower lip, which is drawn inwards with the curve of a conch

shell,--oh what a convolute of cruelty and revenge is _there_!

Cruelty!--to whom? Revenge!--for what? Ask not, whisper not. Look

upwards to other mysteries. In the very region of his temples, driving

itself downwards into his cruel brain, and breaking the continuity of

his diadem, is a horrid chasm, a ravine, a shaft, that many centuries

would not traverse; and it is serrated on its posterior wall with a

harrow that perhaps is partly hidden. From the anterior wall of this

chasm rise, in vertical directions, two processes; one perpendicular,

and rigid as a horn, the other streaming forward before some portentous

breath. What these could be, seemed doubtful; but now, when further

examinations by Sir John Herschel, at the Cape of Good Hope, have

filled up the scattered outline with a rich umbrageous growth, one is

inclined to regard them as the plumes of a sultan. Dressed he is,

therefore, as well as armed. And finally comes Lord Rosse, that

glorifies him with the jewellery [Footnote: _The jewellery of

Stars_. And one thing is very remarkable, viz., that not only the

stars justify this name of jewellery, as usual, by the life of their

splendor, but also, in this case, by their arrangement. No jeweller

could have set, or disposed with more art, the magnificent quadrille of

stars which is placed immediately below the upright plume. There is

also another, a truncated quadrille, wanting only the left hand star

(or you might call it a bisected lozenge) placed on the diadem, but

obliquely placed as regards the curve of that diadem. Two or three

other arrangements are striking, though not equally so, both from their

regularity and from their repeating each other, as the forms in a

kaleidoscope.] of stars: he is now a vision 'to dream of, not to tell:'

he is ready for the worship of those that are tormented in sleep: and

the stages of his solemn uncovering by astronomy, first by Sir W.

Herschel, secondly, by his son, and finally by Lord Rosse, is like the

reversing of some heavenly doom, like the raising of the seals that had

been sealed by the angel, in the Revelations. But the reader naturally

asks, How does all this concern Lord Rosse's telescope on the one side,

or general astronomy on the other? This _nebula_, he will say,

seems a bad kind of fellow by your account; and of course it will not

break my heart to hear, that he has had the conceit taken out of him.

But in what way can _that_ affect the pretensions of this new

instrument; or, if it did, how can the character of the instrument

affect the general condition of a science? Besides, is not the science

a growth from very ancient times? With great respect for the Earl of

Rosse, is it conceivable that he, or any man, by one hour's working the

tackle of his new instrument, can have carried any stunning

revolutionary effect into the heart of a section so ancient in our

mathematical physics? But the reader is to consider, that the ruins

made by Lord Rosse, are in _sidereal_ astronomy, which is almost

wholly a growth of modern times; and the particular part of it

demolished by the new telescope, is almost exclusively the creation of

the two Herschels, father and son. Laplace, it is true, adopted their

views; and he transferred them to the particular service of our own

planetary system. But he gave to them no new sanction, except what

arises from showing that they would account for the appearances, as

they present themselves to our experience at this day. That was a

_negative_ confirmation; by which I mean, that, had their views

failed in the hands of Laplace, then they were proved to be false; but,

_not_ failing, they were not therefore proved to be true. It was

like proving a gun; if the charge is insufficient, or if, in trying the

strength of cast iron, timber, ropes, &c., the strain is not up to the

rigor of the demand, you go away with perhaps a favorable impression as

to the promises of the article; it has stood a moderate trial; it has

stood all the trial that offered, which is always something; but you

are still obliged to feel that, when the ultimate test is applied,

smash may go the whole concern. Lord Rosse applied an ultimate test;

and smash went the whole concern. Really I must have laughed, though

all the world had been angry, when the shrieks and yells of expiring

systems began to reverberate all the way from the belt of Orion; and

positively at the very first broadside delivered from this huge four-

decker of a telescope.

But what was it then that went to wreck? That is a thing more easy to

ask than to answer. At least, for my own part, I complain that some

vagueness hangs over all the accounts of the nebular hypothesis.

However, in this place a brief sketch will suffice.

Herschel the elder, having greatly improved the telescope, began to

observe with special attention a class of remarkable phenomena in the

starry world hitherto unstudied, viz.: milky spots in various stages of

diffusion. The nature of these appearances soon cleared itself up thus

far, that generally they were found to be starry worlds, separated from

ours by inconceivable distances, and in that way concealing at first

their real nature. The whitish gleam was the mask conferred by the

enormity of their remotion. This being so, it might have been supposed

that, as was the faintness of these cloudy spots or _nebulæ_, such

was the distance. But _that_ did not follow: for in the treasury

of nature it turned out that there were other resources for modifying

the powers of distance, for muffling and unmuffling the voice of stars.

Suppose a world at the distance _x_, which distance is so great as

to make the manifestation of that world weak, milky, nebular. Now let

the secret power that wields these awful orbs, push this world back to

a double distance! _that_ should naturally make it paler and more

dilute than ever: and yet by _compression_, by deeper centralization,

this effect shall be defeated; by forcing into far closer neighborhood

the stars which compose this world, again it shall gleam out brighter

when at 2_x_ than when at _x_. At this point of compression, let the

great moulding power a second time push it back; and a second time it

will grow faint. But once more let this world be tortured into closer

compression, again let the screw be put upon it, and once again it

shall shake off the oppression of distance as the dew-drops are shaken

from a lion's mane. And thus in fact the mysterious architect plays at

hide-and-seek with his worlds. 'I will hide it,' he says, 'and it shall

be found again by man; I will withdraw it into distances that shall

seem fabulous, and again it shall apparel itself in glorious light; a

third time I will plunge it into aboriginal darkness, and upon the

vision of man a third time it shall rise with a new epiphany.'

But, says the objector, there is no such world; there is no world that

has thus been driven back, and depressed from one deep to a lower deep.

Granted: but the same effect, an illustration of the same law, is

produced equally, whether you take four worlds, all of the same

magnitude, and plunge them _simultaneously_ into four different

abysses, sinking by graduated distances one below another, or take one

world and plunge it to the same distances _successively_. So in

Geology, when men talk of substances in different stages, or of

transitional states, they do not mean that they have watched the same

individual _stratum_ or _phenomenon_, exhibiting states removed

from each other by depths of many thousand years; how could they?

but they have seen one stage in the case A, another stage in the

case B. They take, for instance, three objects, the same (to use the

technical language of logic) generically, though numerically different,

under separate circumstances, or in different stages of advance. They

are one object for logic, they are three for human convenience. So

again it might seem impossible to give the history of a rose tree from

infancy to age: how could the same rose tree, at the same time, be

young and old? Yet by taking the different developments of its flowers,

even as they hang on the same tree, from the earliest bud to the full-

blown rose, you may in effect pursue this vegetable growth through all

its stages: you have before you the bony blushing little rose-bud, and

the respectable 'mediæval' full-blown rose.

This point settled, let it now be remarked, that Herschel's resources

enabled him to unmask many of these _nebulæ_: stars they were, and

stars he forced them to own themselves. Why should any decent world

wear an _alias_? There was nothing, you know, to be ashamed of in

being an honest cluster of stars. Indeed, they seemed to be sensible of

this themselves, and they now yielded to the force of Herschel's

arguments so far as to show themselves in the new character of

_nebulæ_ spangled with stars; these are the _stellar nebulæ_;

quite as much as you could expect in so short a time: Rome was not

built in a day: and one must have some respect to stellar feelings. It

was noticed, however, that where a bright haze, and not a weak milk-

and-water haze, had revealed itself to the telescope, this, arising

from a case of _compression_, (as previously explained,) required

very little increase of telescopic power to force him into a fuller

confession. He made a clean breast of it. But at length came a dreadful

anomaly. A 'nebula' in the constellation _Andromeda_ turned

restive: another in _Orion_, I grieve to say it, still more so. I

confine myself to the latter. A very low power sufficed to bring him to

a slight confession, which in fact amounted to nothing; the very

highest would not persuade him to show a star. 'Just one,' said some

coaxing person; 'we'll be satisfied with only one.' But no: he would

_not_. He was hardened, 'he wouldn't _split_.' And Herschel

was thus led, after waiting as long as flesh and blood _could_

wait, to infer two classes of _nebulæ_; one that were stars; and

another that were _not_ stars, nor ever were meant to be stars.

Yet _that_ was premature: he found at last, that, though not raised

to the peerage of stars, finally they would be so: they were the

matter of stars; and by gradual condensation would become suns, whose

atmosphere, by a similar process of condensing, would become planets,

capable of brilliant literati and philosophers, in several volumes

octavo. So stood the case for a long time; it was settled to the

satisfaction of Europe that there were two classes of _nebulæ_,

one that _were_ worlds, one that were _not_, but only the pabulum

of future worlds. Silence arose. A voice was heard, 'Let there

be Lord Rosse!' and immediately his telescope walked into Orion;

destroyed the supposed matter of stars; but, in return, created

immeasurable worlds.

As a hint for apprehending the delicacy and difficulty of the process

in sidereal astronomy, let the inexperienced reader figure to himself

these separate cases of perplexity: 1st, A perplexity where the dilemma

arises from the collision between magnitude and distance:--is the size

less, or the distance greater? 2dly, Where the dilemma arises between

motions, a motion in ourselves doubtfully confounded with a motion in

some external body; or, 3dly, Where it arises between possible

positions of an object: is it a real proximity that we see between two

stars, or simply an apparent proximity from lying in the same visual

line, though in far other depths of space? As regards the first

dilemma, we may suppose two laws, A and B, absolutely in contradiction,

laid down at starting: A, that all fixed stars are precisely at the

same _distance_; in this case every difference in the apparent

magnitude will indicate a corresponding difference in the real

magnitude, and will measure that difference. B, that all the fixed

stars are precisely of the same _magnitude_; in which case, every

variety in the size will indicate a corresponding difference in the

distance, and will measure that difference. Nor could we imagine any

exception to these inferences from A or from B, whichever of the two

were assumed, unless through optical laws that might not equally affect

objects under different circumstances; I mean, for instance, that might

suffer a disturbance as applied under hypoth. B, to different depths in

space, or under hypoth. A, to different arrangements of structure in

the star. But thirdly, it is certain, that neither A nor B is the

abiding law: and next it becomes an object by science and by

instruments to distinguish more readily and more certainly between the

cases where the distance has degraded the size, and the cases where the

size being _really_ less, has caused an exaggeration of the

distance: or again, where the size being really less, yet co-operating

with a distance really greater, may degrade the estimate, (though

travelling in a right direction,) below the truth; or again where the

size being really less, yet counteracted by a distance also less, may

equally disturb the truth of human measurements, and so on.

A second large order of equivocating appearances will arise,--not as to

magnitude, but as to motion. If it could be a safe assumption, that the

system to which our planet is attached were absolutely fixed and

motionless, except as regards its own _internal_ relations of

movement, then every change outside of us, every motion that the

registers of astronomy had established, would be objective and not

subjective. It would be safe to pronounce at once that it was a motion

in the object contemplated, _not_ in the subject contemplating.

Or, reversely, if it were safe to assume as a universal law, that no

motion was possible in the starry heavens, then every change of

relations in space, between ourselves and them, would indicate and

would measure a progress, or regress, on the part of our solar system,

in certain known directions. But now, because it is not safe to rest in

either assumption, the range of possibilities for which science has to

provide, is enlarged; the immediate difficulties are multiplied; but

with the result (as in the former case) of reversionally expanding the

powers, and consequently the facilities, lodged both in the science and

in the arts ministerial to the science. Thus, in the constellation

_Cygnus_, there is a star gradually changing its relation to our

system, whose distance from ourselves (as Dr. Nichol tells us) is

ascertained to be about six hundred and seventy thousand times our own

distance from the sun: that is, neglecting minute accuracy, about six

hundred and seventy thousand stages of one hundred million miles each.

This point being known, it falls within the _arts_ of astronomy to

translate this apparent angular motion into miles; and presuming this

change of relation to be not in the star, but really in ourselves, we

may deduce the velocity of our course, we may enter into our _log_

daily the rate at which our whole solar system is running. Bessel, it

seems, the eminent astronomer who died lately, computed this velocity

to be such (viz., three times that of our own earth in its proper

orbit) as would carry us to the star in forty-one thousand years. But,

in the mean time, the astronomer is to hold in reserve some small share

of his attention, some trifle of a side-glance, now and then, to the

possibility of an error, after all, in the main assumption: he must

watch the indications, if any such should arise, that not ourselves,

but the star in _Cygnus_, is the real party concerned, in drifting

at this shocking rate, with no prospect of coming to an anchorage.

[Footnote: It is worth adding at this point, whilst the reader

remembers without effort the numbers, viz., forty-one thousand

years, for the time, (the space being our own distance from the sun

repeated six hundred and seventy thousand times,) what would be the

time required for reaching, in the _body_, that distance to which

Lord Rosse's six feet mirror has so recently extended our

_vision_. The time would be, as Dr. Nichol computes, about two

hundred and fifty millions of years, supposing that our rate of

travelling was about three times that of our earth in its orbit. Now,

as the velocity is assumed to be the same in both cases, the ratio

between the distance (already so tremendous) of Bessel's 61

_Cygni_, and that of Lord Rosse's farthest frontier, is as forty-

one thousand to two hundred and fifty millions. This is a simple rule-

of-three problem for a child. And the answer to it will, perhaps,

convey the simplest expression of the superhuman power lodged in the

new telescope:--as is the ratio of forty-one thousand to two hundred

and fifty million, so is the ratio of our own distance from the sun

multiplied by six hundred and seventy thousand, to the outermost limit

of Lord Rosse's sidereal vision.]

Another class, and a frequent one, of equivocal phenomena, phenomena

that are reconcilable indifferently with either of two assumptions,

though less plausibly reconciled with the one than with the other,

concerns the position of stars that seem connected with each other by

systematic relations, and which yet _may_ lie in very different

depths of space, being brought into seeming connection only by the

human eye. There have been, and there are, cases where two stars

dissemble an interconnection which they really _have_, and other

cases where they simulate an interconnection which they have not. All

these cases of simulation and dissimulation torment the astronomer by

multiplying his perplexities, and deepening the difficulty of escaping

them. He cannot get at the truth: in many cases, magnitude and distance

are in collusion with each other to deceive him: motion subjective is

in collusion with motion objective; duplex systems are in collusion

with fraudulent stars, having no real partnership whatever, but

mimicking such a partnership by means of the limitations or errors

affecting the human eye, where it can apply no other sense to aid or to

correct itself. So that the business of astronomy, in these days, is no

sinecure, as the reader perceives. And by another evidence, it is

continually becoming less of a sinecure. Formerly, one or two men,--

Tycho, suppose, or, in a later age, Cassini and Horrox, and Bradley,

had observatories: one man, suppose, observed the stars for all

Christendom; and the rest of Europe observed _him_. But now, up

and down Europe, from the deep blue of Italian skies to the cold frosty

atmospheres of St. Petersburg and Glasgow, the stars are conscious of

being watched everywhere; and if all astronomers do not publish their

observations, all use them in their speculations. New and brilliantly

appointed observatories are rising in every latitude, or risen; and

none, by the way, of these new-born observatories, is more interesting

from the circumstances of its position, or more _picturesque_ to a

higher organ than the eye--viz., to the human heart--than the New

Observatory raised by the university of Glasgow.[Footnote: It has been

reported, ever since the autumn of 1845, and the report is now,

(August, 1846,) gathering strength, that some railway potentate, having

taken a fancy for the ancient college of Glasgow, as a bauble to hang

about his wife's neck, (no accounting for tastes,) has offered, (or

_will_ offer,) such a price, that the good old academic lady in

this her moss-grown antiquity, seriously thinks of taking him at his

word, packing up her traps, and being off. When a spirit of galavanting

comes across an aged lady, it is always difficult to know where it will

stop: so, in fact, you know, she may choose to steam for Texas. But the

present impression is, that she will settle down by the side of what

you may call her married or settled daughter--the Observatory; which

one would be glad to have confirmed, as indicating that no purpose of

pleasure-seeking had been working in elderly minds, but the instinct of

religious rest and aspiration. The Observatory would thus remind one of

those early Christian anchorites, and self-exiled visionaries, that

being led by almost a necessity of nature to take up their residence in

deserts, sometimes drew after themselves the whole of their own

neighborhood.]

The New Observatory of Glasgow is now, I believe, finished; and the

only fact connected with its history that was painful, as embodying and

recording that Vandal alienation from science, literature, and all

their interests, which has ever marked our too haughty and Caliph-Omar-

like British government, lay in the circumstance that the glasses of

the apparatus, the whole mounting of the establishment, in so far as it

was a scientific establishment, and even the workmen for putting up the

machinery, were imported from Bavaria. We, that once bade the world

stand aside when the question arose about glasses, or the graduation of

instruments, were now literally obliged to stand cap in hand, bowing to

Mr. Somebody, successor of Frauenhofer or Frauendevil, in Munich! Who

caused _that_, we should all be glad to know, if not the wicked

Treasury, that killed the hen that laid the golden eggs by taxing her

until her spine broke? It is to be hoped that, at this moment, and

specifically for this offence, some scores of Exchequer men,

chancellors and other rubbish, are in purgatory, and perhaps working,

with shirt-sleeves tucked up, in purgatorial glass-houses, with very

small allowances of beer, to defray the cost of perspiration. But why

trouble a festal remembrance with commemorations of crimes or

criminals? What makes the Glasgow Observatory so peculiarly

interesting, is its position, connected with and overlooking so vast a

city, having more than three hundred thousand inhabitants, (in spite of

an American sceptic,) nearly all children of toil; and a city, too,

which, from the necessities of its circumstances, draws so deeply upon

that fountain of misery and guilt which some ordinance, as ancient as

'our father Jacob,' with his patriarchal well for Samaria, has

bequeathed to manufacturing towns,--to Ninevehs, to Babylons, to Tyres.

How tarnished with eternal canopies of smoke, and of sorrow; how dark

with agitations of many orders, is the mighty town below! How serene,

how quiet, how lifted above the confusion and the roar, how liberated

from the strifes of earth, is the solemn Observatory that crowns the

grounds above! And duly, at night, just when the toil of over-wrought

Glasgow is mercifully relaxing, then comes the summons to the laboring

astronomer. _He_ speaks not of the night, but of the day and the

flaunting day-light, as the hours 'in which no man can work.' And the

least reflecting of men must be impressed by the idea, that at wide

intervals, but intervals scattered over Europe, whilst 'all that mighty

heart' is, by sleep, resting from its labors, secret eyes are lifted up

to heaven in astronomical watch-towers; eyes that keep watch and ward

over spaces that make us dizzy to remember, eyes that register the

promises of comets, and disentangle the labyrinths of worlds.

Another feature of interest, connected with the Glasgow Observatory, is

personal, and founded on the intellectual characteristics of the

present professor, Dr. Nichol; in the deep meditative style of his mind

seeking for rest, yet placed in conflict for ever with the tumultuous

necessity in _him_ for travelling along the line of revolutionary

thought, and following it loyally, wearied or not, to its natural home.

In a sonnet of Milton, one of three connected with his own blindness,

he distinguishes between two classes of servants that minister to the

purposes of God. '_His_ state,' says he, meaning God's state, the

arrangement of his regular service, 'is kingly;' that is to say, it

resembles the mode of service established in the courts of kings; and,

in this, it resembles that service, that there are two classes of

ministers attending on his pleasure. For, as in the trains of kings are

some that run without resting, night or day, to carry the royal

messages, and also others--great lords in waiting--that move not from

the royal gates; so of the divine retinues, some are for action only,

some for contemplation. 'Thousands' there are that

----'at his bidding speed,

And post o'er land and ocean without rest.'

Others, on the contrary, motionless as statues, that share not in the

agitations of their times, that tremble not in sympathy with the storms

around them, but that listen--that watch--that wait--for secret

indications to be fulfilled, or secret signs to be deciphered. And, of

this latter class, he adds-that they, not less than the others, are

accepted by God; or, as it is so exquisitely expressed in the closing

line,

'_They_ also serve, that only stand and wait.'

Something analogous to this one may see in the distributions of

literature and science. Many popularize and diffuse: some reap and

gather on their own account. Many translate, into languages fit for the

multitude, messages which they receive from human voices: some listen,

like Kubla Khan, far down in caverns or hanging over subterranean

rivers, for secret whispers that mingle and confuse themselves with the

general uproar of torrents, but which can be detected and kept apart by

the obstinate prophetic ear, which spells into words and ominous

sentences the distracted syllables of ærial voices. Dr. Nichol is one

of those who pass to and fro between these classes; and has the rare

function of keeping open their vital communications. As a popularizing

astronomer, he has done more for the benefit of his great science than

all the rest of Europe combined: and now, when he notices, without

murmur, the fact that his office of popular teacher is almost taken out

of his hands, (so many are they who have trained of late for the duty,)

that change has, in fact, been accomplished through knowledge, through

explanations, through suggestions, dispersed and prompted by himself.

For my own part, as one belonging to the laity, and not to the

_clerus_, in the science of astronomy, I could scarcely have

presumed to report minutely, or to sit in the character of dissector

upon the separate details of Dr. Nichol's works, either this, or those

which have preceded it, had there even been room left disposable for

such a task. But in this view it is sufficient to have made the general

acknowledgment which already _has_ been made, that Dr. Nichol's

works, and his oral lectures upon astronomy, are to be considered as

the _fundus_ of the knowledge on that science now working in this

generation. More important it is, and more in reconciliation with the

tenor of my own ordinary studies, to notice the philosophic spirit in

which Dr. Nichol's works are framed; the breadth of his views, the

eternal tendency of his steps in advance, or (if advance on that

quarter, or at that point, happens to be absolutely walled out for the

present,) the vigor of the _reconnoissances_ by which he examines

the hostile intrenchments. Another feature challenges notice. In

reading astronomical works, there arises (from old experience of what

is usually most faulty) a wish either for the naked severities of

science, with a total abstinence from all display of enthusiasm; or

else, if the cravings of human sensibility are to be met and gratified,

that it shall be by an enthusiasm unaffected and grand as its subject.

Of that kind is the enthusiasm of Dr. Nichol. The grandeurs of

astronomy are such to him who has a capacity for being grandly moved.

They are none at all to him who has not. To the mean they become

meannesses. Space, for example, has no grandeur to him who has no space

in the theatre of his own brain. I know writers who report the marvels

of velocity, &c., in such a way that they become insults to yourself.

It is obvious that in _their_ way of insisting on our earth's

speed in her annual orbit, they do not seek to exalt _her_, but to

mortify _you_. And, besides, these fellows are answerable for

provoking people into fibs:--for I remember one day, that reading a

statement of this nature, about how many things the Earth had done that

we could never hope to do, and about the number of cannon balls,

harnessed as a _tandem_, which the Earth would fly past, without

leaving time to say, _How are you off for soap?_ in vexation of

heart I could not help exclaiming--'That's nothing: I've done a great

deal more myself;' though, when one turns it in one's mind, you know

there must be some inaccuracy _there_. How different is Dr.

Nichol's enthusiasm from this hypocritical and vulgar wonderment! It

shows itself not merely in reflecting the grandeurs of his theme, and

by the sure test of detecting and allying itself with all the indirect

grandeurs that arrange themselves from any distance, upon or about that

centre, but by the manifest promptness with which Dr. Nichol's

enthusiasm awakens itself upon _every_ road that leads to things

elevating for man; or to things promising for knowledge; or to things

which, like dubious theories or imperfect attempts at systematizing,

though neutral as regards knowledge, minister to what is greater than

knowledge, viz., to intellectual _power_, to the augmented power

of handling your materials, though with no more materials than before.

In his geological and cosmological inquiries, in his casual

speculations, the same quality of intellect betrays itself; the

intellect that labors in sympathy with the laboring _nisus_ of

these gladiatorial times; that works (and sees the necessity of

working) the apparatus of many sciences towards a composite result; the

intellect that retires in one direction only to make head in another;

and that already is prefiguring the route beyond the barriers, whilst

yet the gates are locked.

There was a man in the last century, and an eminent man too, who used

to say, that whereas people in general pretended to admire astronomy as

being essentially sublime, he for _his_ part looked upon all that

sort of thing as a swindle; and, on the contrary, he regarded the solar

system as decidedly vulgar; because the planets were all of them so

infernally punctual, they kept time with such horrible precision, that

they forced him, whether he would or no, to think of nothing but post-

office clocks, mail-coaches, and book-keepers. Regularity may be

beautiful, but it excludes the sublime. What he wished for was

something like Lloyd's list.

_Comets_--due 3; arrived 1.

_Mercury_, when last seen, appeared to be distressed; but made no

signals.

_Pallas_ and _Vesta_, not heard of for some time; supposed to

have foundered.

_Moon_, spoken last night through a heavy bank of clouds; out

sixteen days: all right.

Now this poor man's misfortune was, to have lived in the days of mere

planetary astronomy. At present, when our own little system, with all

its grandeurs, has dwindled by comparison to a subordinate province, if

any man is bold enough to say so, a poor shivering unit amongst myriads

that are brighter, we ought no longer to talk of astronomy, but of

_the astronomies_. There is the planetary, the cometary, the

sidereal, perhaps also others; as, for instance, even yet the nebular;

because, though Lord Rosse has smitten it with the son of Amram's rod,

has made it open, and cloven a path through it, yet other and more

fearful _nebulæ_ may loom in sight, (if further improvements

should be effected in the telescope,) that may puzzle even Lord Rosse.

And when he tells his _famulus_--'Fire a shot at that strange

fellow, and make him show his colors,' possibly the mighty stranger may

disdain the summons. That would be vexatious: we should all be incensed

at _that_. But no matter. What's a _nebula_, what's a world,

more or less? In the spiritual heavens are many mansions: in the starry

heavens, that are now unfolding and preparing to unfold before us, are

many vacant areas upon which the astronomer may pitch his secret

pavilion. He may dedicate himself to the service of the _Double

Suns_; he has my license to devote his whole time to the quadruple

system of suns in _Lyra_. Swammerdam spent his life in a ditch

watching frogs and tadpoles; why may not an astronomer give nine lives,

if he had them, to the watching of that awful appearance in

_Hercules_, which pretends to some rights over our own unoffending

system? Why may he not mount guard with public approbation, for the

next fifty years, upon the zodiacal light, the interplanetary ether,

and other rarities, which the professional body of astronomers would

naturally keep (if they could) for their own private enjoyment? There

is no want of variety now, nor in fact of irregularity: for the most

exquisite clock-work, which from enormous distance _seems_ to go

wrong, virtually for us _does_ go wrong; so that our friend of the

last century, who complained of the solar system, would not need to do

so any longer. There are anomalies enough to keep him cheerful. There

are now even things to alarm us; for anything in the starry worlds that

look suspicious, anything that ought _not_ to be there, is, for

all purposes of frightening us, as good as a ghost.

But of all the novelties that excite my own interest in the expanding

astronomy of recent times, the most delightful and promising are those

charming little pyrotechnic planetoids,[Footnote: _'Pyrotechnic

Planetoids:'_--The reader will understand me as alluding to the

periodic shooting stars. It is now well known, that as, upon our own

poor little earthly ocean, we fall in with certain phenomena as we

approach certain latitudes; so also upon the great ocean navigated by

our Earth, we fall in with prodigious showers of these meteors at

periods no longer uncertain, but fixed as jail-deliveries. 'These

remarkable showers of meteors,' says Dr. Nichol, 'observed at different

periods in August and November, seem to demonstrate the fact, that, at

these periods, we have come in contact with two streams of such

planetoids then intersecting the earth's orbit.' If they intermit, it

is only because they are shifting their nodes, or points of

intersection.] that variegate our annual course. It always struck me as

most disgusting, that, in going round the sun, we must be passing

continually over old roads, and yet we had no means of establishing an

acquaintance with them: they might as well be new for every trip. Those

chambers of ether, through which we are tearing along night and day,

(for _our_ train stops at no stations,) doubtless, if we could put

some mark upon them, must be old fellows perfectly liable to

recognition. I suppose, _they_ never have notice to quit. And yet,

for want of such a mark, though all our lives flying past them and

through them, we can never challenge them as known. The same thing

happens in the desert: one monotonous iteration of sand, sand, sand,

unless where some miserable fountain stagnates, forbids all approach to

familiarity: nothing is circumstantiated or differenced: travel it for

three generations, and you are no nearer to identification of its

parts: so that it amounts to travelling through an abstract idea. For

the desert, really I suspect the thing is hopeless: but, as regards our

planetary orbit, matters are mending: for the last six or seven years I

have heard of these fiery showers, but indeed I cannot say how much

earlier they were first noticed,[Footnote: Somewhere I have seen it

remarked, that if, on a public road, you meet a party of four women, it

is at least fifty to one that they are all laughing; whereas, if you

meet an equal party of my own unhappy sex, you may wager safely that

they are talking gravely, and that one of them is uttering the word

_money_. Hence it must be, viz, because our sisters are too much

occupied with the playful things of this earth, and our brothers with

its gravities, that neither party sufficiently watches the skies. And

_that_ accounts for a fact which often has struck myself, viz.,

that, in cities, on bright moonless nights, when some brilliant

skirmishings of the Aurora are exhibiting, or even a luminous arch,

which is a broad ribbon of snowy light that spans the skies, positively

unless I myself say to people--'Eyes upwards!' not one in a hundred,

male or female, but fails to see the show, though it may be seen

_gratis_, simply because their eyes are too uniformly reading the

earth. This downward direction of the eyes, however, must have been

worse in former ages: because else it never _could_ have happened

that, until Queen Anne's days, nobody ever hinted in a book that there

_was_ such a thing, or _could_ be such a thing, as the Aurora

Borealis; and in fact Halley had the credit of discovering it.] as

celebrating two annual festivals--one in August, one in November. You

are a little too late, reader, for seeing this year's summer festival;

but that's no reason why you should not engage a good seat for the

November meeting; which, if I recollect, is about the 9th, or the Lord

Mayor's day, and on the whole better worth seeing. For anything

_we_ know, this may be a great day in the earth's earlier history;

she may have put forth her original rose on this day, or tried her hand

at a primitive specimen of wheat; or she may, in fact, have survived

some gunpowder plot about this time; so that the meteoric appearance

may be a kind congratulating _feu-de-joye_, on the anniversary of

the happy event. What it is that the 'cosmogony man' in the 'Vicar of

Wakefield' would have thought of such novelties, whether he would have

favored us with his usual opinion upon such topics, viz., that

_anarchon ara kai ateleutaion to pan_, or have sported a new one

exclusively for this occasion, may be doubtful. What it is that

astronomers think, who are a kind of 'cosmogony men,' the reader may

learn from Dr. Nichol, Note B, (p. 139, 140.)

In taking leave of a book and a subject so well fitted to draw out the

highest mode of that grandeur, which _can_ connect itself with the

external, (a grandeur capable of drawing down a spiritual being to

earth, but not of raising an earthly being to heaven,) I would wish to

contribute my own brief word of homage to this grandeur by recalling

from a fading remembrance of twenty-five years back a short

_bravura_ of John Paul Richter. I call it a _bravura_, as being

intentionally a passage of display and elaborate execution; and

in this sense I may call it partly 'my own,' that at twenty-five years'

distance, (after one single reading,) it would not have been possible

for any man to report a passage of this length without greatly

disturbing [Footnote: _'Disturbing;'_--neither perhaps should I

much have sought to avoid alterations if the original had been lying

before me: for it takes the shape of a dream; and this most brilliant

of all German writers wanted in that field the severe simplicity, that

horror of the _too much_, belonging to Grecian architecture, which

is essential to the perfection of a dream considered as a work of art.

He was too elaborate, to realize the grandeur of the shadowy.] the

texture of the composition: by altering, one makes it partly one's own;

but it is right to mention, that the sublime turn at the end belongs

entirely to John Paul.

'God called up from dreams a man into the vestibule of heaven, saying,

--"Come thou hither, and see the glory of my house." And to the

servants that stood around his throne he said,--"Take him, and undress

him from his robes of flesh: cleanse his vision, and put a new breath

into his nostrils: only touch not with any change his human heart--the

heart that weeps and trembles." It was done; and, with a mighty angel

for his guide, the man stood ready for his infinite voyage; and from

the terraces of heaven, without sound or farewell, at once they wheeled

away into endless space. Sometimes with the solemn flight of angel wing

they fled through Zaarrahs of darkness, through wildernesses of death,

that divided the worlds of life: sometimes they swept over frontiers,

that were quickening under prophetic motions from God. Then, from a

distance that is counted only in heaven, light dawned for a time

through a sleepy film: by unutterable pace the light swept to

_them_, they by unutterable pace to the light: in a moment the

rushing of planets was upon them: in a moment the blazing of suns was

around them. Then came eternities of twilight, that revealed, but were

not revealed. To the right hand and to the left towered mighty

constellations, that by self-repetitions and answers from afar, that by

counter-positions, built up triumphal gates, whose architraves, whose

archways--horizontal, upright--rested, rose--at altitudes, by spans--

that seemed ghostly from infinitude. Without measure were the

architraves, past number were the archways, beyond memory the gates.

Within were stairs that scaled the eternities above, that descended to

the eternities below: above was below, below was above, to the man

stripped of gravitating body: depth was swallowed up in height

insurmountable, height was swallowed up in depth unfathomable. Suddenly

as thus they rode from infinite to infinite, suddenly as thus they

tilted over abysmal worlds, a mighty cry arose--that systems more

mysterious, that worlds more billowy,--other heights, and other

depths,--were coming, were nearing, were at hand. Then the man sighed,

and stopped, shuddered and wept. His over-laden heart uttered itself in

tears; and he said,--"Angel, I will go no farther. For the spirit of

man aches with this infinity. Insufferable is the glory of God. Let me

lie down in the grave from the persecutions of the infinite; for end, I

see, there is none." And from all the listening stars that shone around

issued a choral voice, "The man speaks truly: end there is none, that

ever yet we heard of." "End is there none?" the angel solemnly

demanded: "Is there indeed no end? And is this the sorrow that kills

you?" But no voice answered, that he might answer himself. Then the

angel threw up his glorious hands to the heaven of heavens; saying,

"End is there none to the universe of God? Lo! also there is no

Beginning."'

NOTE.--On throwing his eyes hastily over the preceding paper, the

writer becomes afraid that some readers may give such an interpretation

to a few playful expressions upon the age of our earth, &c., as to

class him with those who use geology, cosmology, &c., for purposes of

attack, or insinuation against the Scriptures. Upon this point,

therefore, he wishes to make a firm explanation of his own opinions,

which, (whether right or wrong,) will liberate him, once and for all,

from any such jealousy.

It is sometimes said, that the revealer of a true religion, does not

come amongst men for the sake of teaching truths in science, or

correcting errors in science. Most justly is this said: but often in

terms far too feeble. For generally these terms are such as to imply,

that, although no function of his mission, it was yet open to him--

although not pressing with the force of an obligation upon the

revealer, it was yet at his discretion--if not to correct other men's

errors, yet at least in his own person to speak with scientific

precision. I contend that it was _not_. I contend, that to have

uttered the truths of astronomy, of geology, &c., at the era of new-

born Christianity, was not only _below_ the purposes of a

religion, but would have been _against_ them. Even upon errors of

a far more important class than any errors in science can ever be,--

superstitions, for instance, that degraded the very idea of God;

prejudices and false usages, that laid waste human happiness, (such as

slavery and many hundreds of other abuses that might be mentioned,) the

rule evidently acted upon by the Founder of Christianity was this--

Given the purification of the fountain, once assumed that the fountains

of truth are cleansed, all these derivative currents of evil will

cleanse themselves. And the only exceptions, which I remember, to this

rule, are two cases in which, from the personal appeal made to his

decision, Christ would have made himself a party to wretched delusions,

if he had not condescended to expose their folly. But, as a general

rule, the branches of error were disregarded, and the roots only

attacked. If, then, so lofty a station was taken with regard even to

such errors as had moral and spiritual relations, how much more with

regard to the comparative trifles, (as in the ultimate relations of

human nature they are,) of merely human science! But, for my part, I go

further, and assert, that upon three reasons it was impossible for any

messenger from God, (or offering himself in that character,) for a

moment to have descended into the communication of truth merely

scientific, or economic, or worldly. And the reasons are these:

_First_, Because it would have degraded his mission, by lowering

it to the base level of a collision with human curiosity, or with petty

and transitory interests. _Secondly_, Because it would have ruined

his mission; would utterly have prostrated the free agency and the

proper agency of that mission. He that, in those days, should have

proclaimed the true theory of the Solar System and the heavenly forces,

would have been shut up at once--as a lunatic likely to become

dangerous. But suppose him to have escaped _that_; still, as a

divine teacher, he has no liberty of caprice. He must stand to the

promises of his own acts. Uttering the first truth of a science, he is

pledged to the second: taking the main step, he is committed to all

which follow. He is thrown at once upon the endless controversies which

science in every stage provokes, and in none more than in the earliest.

Or, if he retires as from a scene of contest that he had not

anticipated, he retires as one confessing a human precipitance and a

human oversight, weaknesses, venial in others, but fatal to the

pretensions of a divine teacher. Starting besides from such

pretensions, he could not (as others might) have the privilege of

selecting arbitrarily or partially. If upon one science, then upon

all,--if upon science, then upon, art,--if upon art and science, then

upon _every_ branch of social economy, upon _every_ organ of

civilization, his reformations and advances are equally due; due as to

all, if due as to any. To move in one direction, is constructively to

undertake for all. Without power to retreat, he has thus thrown the

intellectual interests of his followers into a channel utterly alien to

the purposes of a spiritual mission.

Thus far he has simply failed: but next comes a worse result; an evil,

not negative but positive. Because, _thirdly_, to apply the light

of a revelation for the benefit of a merely human science, which is

virtually done by so applying the illumination of an _inspired_

teacher, is--to assault capitally the scheme of God's discipline and

training for man. To improve by _heavenly_ means, if but in one

solitary science--to lighten, if but in one solitary section, the

condition of difficulty which had been designed for the strengthening

and training of human faculties, is _pro tanto_ to disturb--to

cancel--to contradict a previous purpose of God, made known by silent

indications from the beginning of the world. Wherefore did God give to

man the powers for contending with scientific difficulties? Wherefore

did he lay a secret train of continual occasions, that should rise, by

intervals, through thousands of generations, for provoking and

developing those activities in man's intellect, if, after all, he is to

send a messenger of his own, more than human, to intercept and strangle

all these great purposes? When, therefore, the persecutors of Galileo,

alleged that Jupiter, for instance, could not move in the way alleged,

because then the Bible would have proclaimed it,--as they thus threw

back upon God the burthen of discovery, which he had thrown upon

Galileo, why did they not, by following out their own logic, throw upon

the Bible the duty of discovering the telescope, or discovering the

satellites of Jupiter? And, as no such discoveries were there, why did

they not, by parity of logic, and for mere consistency, deny the

telescope as a fact, deny the Jovian planets as facts? But this it is

to mistake the very meaning and purposes of a revelation. A revelation

is not made for the purpose of showing to idle men that which they may

show to themselves, by faculties already given to them, if only they

will exert those faculties, but for the purpose of showing _that_

which the moral darkness of man will not, without supernatural light,

allow him to perceive. With disdain, therefore, must every considerate

person regard the notion,--that God could wilfully interfere with his

own plans, by accrediting ambassadors to reveal astronomy, or any other

science, which he has commanded men to cultivate _without_

revelation, by endowing them with all the natural powers for doing so.

Even as regards astronomy, a science so nearly allying itself to

religion by the loftiness and by the purity of its contemplations,

Scripture is nowhere the _parent_ of any doctrine, nor so much as

the silent sanctioner of any doctrine. Scripture cannot become the

author of falsehood,--though it were as to a trifle, cannot become a

party to falsehood. And it is made impossible for Scripture to teach

falsely, by the simple fact that Scripture, on such subjects, will not

condescend to teach at all. The Bible adopts the erroneous language of

men, (which at any rate it must do, in order to make itself

understood,) not by way of sanctioning a theory, but by way of using a

fact. The Bible _uses_ (postulates) the phenomena of day and

night, of summer and winter, and expresses them, in relation to their

causes, as _men_ express them, men, even, that are scientific

astronomers. But the results, which are all that concern Scripture, are

equally true, whether accounted for by one hypothesis which is

philosophically just, or by another which is popular and erring.

Now, on the other hand, in geology and cosmology, the case is still

stronger. _Here_ there is no opening for a compliance even with

popular language. _Here_, where there is no such stream of

apparent phenomena running counter (as in astronomy) to the real

phenomena, neither is there any popular language opposed to the

scientific. The whole are abstruse speculations, even as regards their

objects, not dreamed of as possibilities, either in their true aspects

or their false aspects, till modern times. The Scriptures, therefore,

nowhere allude to such sciences, either under the shape of histories,

applied to processes current and in movement, or under the shape of

theories applied to processes past and accomplished. The Mosaic

cosmogony, indeed, gives the succession of natural births; and that

succession will doubtless be more and more confirmed and illustrated as

geology advances. But as to the time, the duration, of this cosmogony,

it is the idlest of notions that the Scriptures either have or could

have condescended to human curiosity upon so awful a prologue to the

drama of this world. Genesis would no more have indulged so mean a

passion with respect to the mysterious inauguration of the world, than

the Apocalypse with respect to its mysterious close. 'Yet the six

_days_ of Moses!' Days! But is any man so little versed in biblical

language as not to know that (except in the merely historical

parts of the Jewish records) every section of time has a secret and

separate acceptation in the Scriptures? Does an _æon_, though a

Grecian word, bear scripturally [either in Daniel or in Saint John] any

sense known to Grecian ears? Do the seventy _weeks_ of the prophet

mean weeks in the sense of human calendars? Already the Psalms, (xc)

already St. Peter, (2d Epist.) warn us of a peculiar sense attached to

the word _day_ in divine ears? And who of the innumerable

interpreters understands the twelve hundred and odd days in Daniel, or

his two thousand and odd days, to mean, by possibility, periods of

twenty-four hours? Surely the theme of Moses was as mystical, and as

much entitled to the benefit of mystical language, as that of the

prophets.

The sum of the matter is this:--God, by a Hebrew prophet, is sublimely

described as _the Revealer_; and, in variation of his own expression,

the same prophet describes him as the Being 'that knoweth the

darkness.' Under no idea can the relations of God to man be more

grandly expressed. But of what is he the revealer? Not surely of those

things which he has enabled man to reveal for himself, and which he has

commanded him so to reveal, but of those things which, were it not

through special light from heaven, must eternally remain sealed up in

the inaccessible darkness. On this principle we should all laugh at a

revealed cookery. But essentially the same ridicule applies to a

revealed astronomy, or a revealed geology. As a fact, there _is_

no such astronomy or geology: as a possibility, by the _a priori_

argument which I have used, (viz., that a revelation on such fields,

would contradict _other_ machineries of providence,) there _can_ be no

such astronomy or geology. Consequently there _can_ be none such in the

Bible. Consequently there _is_ none. Consequently there can be no

schism or feud upon _these_ subjects between the Bible and the

philosophies outside. Geology is a field left open, with the amplest

permission from above, to the widest and wildest speculations of man.