and silent streams, and peaceful cottages "embowered in trees," that they are complacently looking down upon, making beauty still more beauteous; I can imagine the manifold tribes of lovers they are surveying walking in quiet happiness, or tremulous joy, or pouting coyness, or sheepish bashfulness, beneath their beams, engaged in all sorts of speculations, from plans for the realization of the most extravagant bliss down to the most feasible and economical means of purchasing household furniture. I can imagine the multitudinous race of youthful poets who are standing on innumerable balconies, with folded arms and upturned eyes and upturned hair, with a mixture of hazy inspiration inflating and leaden dulness pressing upon their pericraniums, jumbled up with confused notions of power and Byron and might and majesty, until the chilling night-dews check the formation of incipient sonnets to Venus, Jupiter, or "fiery Mars," by hinting that they may catch a cold; and they walk into their chambers, and stalk from the contemplation of immensity unto their pier-glass, to contemplate how they may have looked should any proprietors of petticoats from adjacent windows have made them the objects of their terrestrial speculations while they were picturesquely gazing on things celestial. I can imagine all this and much more, while lolling lazily out of the window, on a moonlight night, in a speculative mood; but when I come to view those heavenly bodies scientifically -astronomically-arithmetically-touching their size, distance, density, specific gravity, etc., together with considerations respecting the centripetal and centrifugal forces by which their motions are regulated, my imagination, as the sailors say, is "taken all aback!" It is making mere matter-offact work of it, subjecting the objects of one's love, wonder, and unbounded admiration, at once to "cold, material laws," to weight and measurement, and divesting them of all their beautiful and poetical properties. Mythologically considered, I love the planetary bodies well. Literature cannot do without the gods and demi-gods, and full and half-bred divinities of former times. Beautifully has Schiller said, in his Wallenstein (as beautifully translated by Coleridge) "The intelligible forms of ancient poets, Or chasms, or watʼry depths; all these have vanish'd, No more need be added on this point. "The words of Mercury are harsh, after the songs of Apollo." I entertain another quirk or notion against astronomy, except when studied for practical purposes. Though humility be a good thing, a sense of extreme littleness is not; and when we turn from the tremendous-the astounding study of astronomy, to consider what we are in connection with what is, we become ludicrously small, even when viewed through that powerful magnifier-our own estimation. In the study of natural history, when we read of thousands of insects inhabiting a drop of water, or colonizing a green leaf, we are Brobdignagians, the least of us. But when we come to consider that this "great globe" itself, with all its storms and tempests, its thunder and fierce lightning, is, as regards size, a mere trifle to that of surrounding bodies, and, compared to them in quantity, as a grain of sand to its brethren of the seashore, the consideration has a depressing and not an elevating effect. In such a case, what are we who strut and fret about, and take upon us "pride, pomp, and circumstance?" What is our glory or grandeur-our wit or wisdom-our civic, literary, or military fame? Why, we are comparatively smaller than we can possibly comprehend. Shakspeare is a midge, and Napoleon a thing too diminutive to be thought of. Our virtues and our vices sink into insignificance, as, who should trouble themselves about the virtues of a grasshopper, or the vicious propensities of a caterpillar, or enter with interest into the humors, whims, foibles, and eccentricities of a mite? We lose our distinctive qualities as men and women, and become a mass of animalcules. It is discouraging to think of it. Again, to a certain class of minds, such as have never thoroughly been able to master the perplexities of the multiplication-table; the billions, trillions, quintillions, and so on, with which astronomy abounds, is perfectly incomprehensible. They read of a billion or so of miles, but have about as clear an idea of the distance implied, as they have of the occult mysteries of duodecimals. They have a vague idea, perchance, that it may be as far as China and back again, but nothing more. For my own part, I had always looked upon the enumeration of the sum total of the national debt of England as the most august and imposing mass of figures that could be brought together for any conceivable purpose. Why, look now, it becomes comparatively an unostentatious unit, as it were, a mere fraction. "The distance of the star Draconis appears, by Dr. Bradley's observations, to be at least four hundred thousand times that of the sun, and the distance of the nearest fixed star not less than forty thousand diameters of the earth's annual orbit; that is, the distance of the earth from the former, is at least 38,000,000,000,000 miles, and the latter not less than 7,000,000,000,000 miles. A cannon-ball, supposing it could preserve the same velocity, would not reach the nearest of the fixed stars in six hundred thousand years!" There is goodly work enough to upset any moderate man's notions of time and space. Had this cannon-ball taken its departure in the time of Cheops, or even Cheops' grandfather, (if the imagination can roam so far back into the dense blackness of the past,) it would even now be merely at the outset of its journey. Cheops' grandfather dandles young Cheops on his knee he in turn grows up, waxes in years, builds the everlasting (in our frail acceptation of the word) pyramids, lives to an antediluvian age, dies, is buried, and forgotten; successive generations spring up and pass away; states rise and fall; empires expand and decay, and expand again, up to this present 1834, and yet this cannonball, that has been travelling all this time with inconceivable rapidity, is, as it were, but a hop, step, and jump on its way towards the nearest fixed star! This way of thinking will never do. It diminishes our ideas of the sombre stateliness of the past, and makes "hoar antiquity" a thing of yesterday. The by-gone glories of departed empires, looming with added grandeur through the indistinct and spectral past, must seem, to a mind familiarized with such unconscionable notions of time and space, but as things that had existence an inconsiderable time ago, last week, or the week before. Let us leave this speculative star-gazing, and turn our attention to our own snug little portion of the solar system, with all its infinite varieties of men, manners, customs, and countries. Abandon astronomy to Doctor Herschel and other |