to wander millions of years in reaching to us." In fact, what we term the firmament is but a single cluster of stars. Such clusters are scattered with immense profusion through the field of space, and are of the most gorgeous and brilliant appearance. Take the cluster which is found in the constellation Hercules, and no force or compass of words can express its magnificence. Perhaps no one ever saw it for the first time through a telescope without being filled with rapture, and uttering a shout of wonder. Yet this is but one out of myriads. The number of such masses is infinite. Nor are they confined to any one portion of the heavens. In both hemispheres, what were hitherto regarded as mere specks, making their mysterious appearance in the great pathway across the heavens, now come out as so many firmaments or systems of firmaments, glorious as our own, each divided from the other by unmeasured intervals of space, yet all bound together by laws and relationships fixed and immutable.

In the study of these celestial phenomena, we might speak of their apparent brightness or magnitude, their distances, their relation and harmony, the laws by which they are governed, their ultimate purposes, their probable duration or possible dissolution; but we deem it preferable to give a summary of those facts and results which the telescope has disclosed to us. Those mighty intervals which separate the celestial bodies were supposed to be filled with nebulous matter in a state of gradual condensation, and ever tending toward some central point: but a riper science has proved that these nebulæ are open beds of stars, lying farther down in space; that the planets are all connected with great central orbs; that each fixed star is the center of a system; that suns revolve around suns in definite orbits, and in some of their revolutions fill up a million of our years, or even more; that these bodies are found in larger or smaller groups, from the double stars up to thousands and thousands beautifully adjusted and harmonized; that these clusters go to make up the firmaments in all their ascending magnitude and glory; that these firmaments, and systems, and suns, are separated the one from the other by intervals of space unmeasured and incalculable; that the nearest fixed star, Sirius,

is more than two hundred thousand times farther removed from us than the sun, that is, nineteen billions, two hundred thousand millions of miles; that there are clusters eighteen thousand times more distant than this; that the light from these bodies, traveling at the rate of a hundred and ninety-two thousand miles every second, would take a million of years to reach our earth; that these bodies are of different magnitudes, according to their apparent brightness; that some of them are equal in size to many hundreds of our globe; that they divide themselves into two classes-the fixed stars, among which no change of situation can be detected, and those which are erratic or wandering, such as the sun, moon, and planets, as well as that singular class of bodies termed comets; that these stars are scattered by myriads over the heavens; that there are infinitely distant crowds of stars, collected in such masses that their light flows together into a whitish cloud, and no longer permits us by the aid of the most powerful instrument to isolate one star from another; that there are heavens, and heavens of heavens encircling the one the other, till we are lost in the vastness and glory of the scene; that these heavens with all their uncounted millions of ever-burning suns and attendant planets are moving round one great common center; and that the whole scheme of worlds is maintained by the one universal and ever-active law of attraction, in its sublime order and unbroken harmony. What a scene this, for contemplation and for study! How we are lifted up from the darkness and the din of this lower world, into the everdeepening light and calm of those higher and truly serene regions! What apocalyptic visions have we of the ever-widening and ever unfolding glory of the great Creator! What revelations do we receive of his eternal power and unconfined beneficence! What an ascent do we make, and how near do we get to that inner temple in which his Godhead shines out with burning and insufferable brightness! How unspeakably important appears his favor! How awful to contemplate his displeasure!

The telescope, which wrought such wonders in the hands and under the guiding genius of Herschel, has, by the efforts of Lord Rosse, heightened and embellished the discoveries of the great philosopher.

When, in 1839, his lordship constructed a reflector, with a speculum three feet in diameter, and of twenty-seven feet focal distance, it was considered one of the most accurate and powerful instruments that had ever been made. And when he spoke of the possibility of producing a speculum six feet in diameter, it was deemed something chimerical; but nothing daunted by the magnitude and difficulty of the undertaking, he put it to the test. The speculum of his great telescope is above six feet in diameter, five inches and a half thick at the edges, and five inches at the center, and weighs above three tons; while the whole apparatus and expense of erection cost no less a sum than $60,000. Now, as the power of a telescope to penetrate into space depends on the quantity of light which it can receive, the light reflect ed from this speculum is more than double that from Herschel's largest and most powerful reflector. This has a reflecting surface of five thousand and seventy-one square inches, while that of Herschel's forty-feet instruments had only eighteen hundred and eleven square inches on its surface. By his lordship's reflector we are

recognized in the planetary paths, as sure as that filmy comet is drawing in its orbit, must they too approach the sun, and at the destined term of separate existence, be resumed into his mass. . . . Absolute permanence is visible nowhere around us; and the fact of change merely intimates that in the exhaustless womb of the future, unevolved wonders are in store. The phenomenon referred to, would simply point to the close of one mighty cycle in the history of the solar orb-the passing away of arrangements which have fulfilled their objects, that they might be transformed into new. Thus is the periodic death of a plant, perhaps, essential to its prolonged life; and when the individual dies and disappears, fresh and vigorous forms spring from the elements which composed it.

Mark the chrysalis! It is the grave of the worm, but the cradle of the sun-born insect. The broken bowl shall yet be healed and beautified by the potter, and a voice of joyful note shall awaken one day even the silence of the urn!"

A DAUGHTER'S MARRIAGE. HE departure of a son from beneath

of space, and still find ourselves but on the margin of that universe which stretches away into the immense and the infinite. "It is when one goes into regions so new and remote that the character of the universe in its majesty and infinite variety appears in its most striking attributes. In search of magnificence, it is true, we need not wander far-witness the fields which encircle our homes-the blade of the modest grass which adorns them; but those heavens are fresh, and familiarity has not left its footprint on their untrodden floor. In the silence of midnight, that noble curtain stretched out above us, and the idea, present and impressive, of its great orbs obediently pursuing their stupendous paths, there is a solemnity which sometimes falls upon the spirit, not unlike the feeling of the prophet when he heard that still small voice and knew it to be the token of the presence of God!"

It is a question of interest to some astronomers-is this great system of suns and firmaments formed for perpetuity? Are the foundations of this mighty and gorgeous temple laid forever? In the eloquent words of Professor Nicholl :"Although no mark of age has yet been

spectacle of desolation. Masculine life has, from infancy, an individuality, an independence, an exotism, so to say, which is essentially wanting to female existence. When a son abandons his parents, to create for himself a separate interest, this separation causes but little interruption in their mutual relations. A man marries, and still maintains his friendships, his habits, and his filial affections. Nothing is changed in his life; it is only an additional tie. His departure is consequently a mere simple separation; while the departure of a young girl, become the wife of a few hours, is a real desertion—a desertion with all its duties and feelings still fresh about it. In one word, the son is a sapling which has always grown apart from the trunk; while the daughter has, on the contrary, formed an essential portion of it, and to detach her from her place is to mutilate the tree itself. You have surrounded her youth with unspeakable tenderness-the exhaustless tenderness of your paternal and maternal hearts; and she, in return, has appeared to pour forth upon you both an equally inexhaustible gratitude: you loved her beyond all the world, and she

day, a man arrives, invited and welcomed by yourselves; and this man of your own choice carries off to his domestic eyry your gentle dove, far from the soft nest which your love had made for her, and to which hers had clung. On the morrow you look around you, you listen, you wait, you seek for something which you cannot find. The cage is empty; the tuneful linnet has flown; silence has succeeded to its melodious warblings; it does not come as it did only on the previous morning, fluttering its perfumed wings about your pillow, and awakening you by its soft caresses. Nothing remains but a painful calm, a painful silence, a painful void. The chamber of the absent darling offers only that disorder which it is so melancholy for a mother to contemplate; not the joyous and impatient disorder of occupation, but that of abandonment. Maidenly garments scattered here and there; girlish fancies no longer prized; chairs heaped with half-worn dresses; drawers left partially open, and ransacked to their remotest corners; a bed in which no one has slept; a crowd of charming trifles, which the young girl loved, but which the young wife despises, and which are littered over the carpet like the feathers dropped by the linnet, when the hawk made the timid bird its prey. Such is the depressing sight which wrings tears from the mother's heart. Nor is this all: from this day she occupies only the second place in the affections of her departed idol; and even that merely until the happiness of maternity shall have taught her whom she weeps to assign to her one still lower. This man, this stranger, unknown a few months, it may be but a few weeks previously, has assumed a right over affections which were once almost entirely her own; a few hours of fleeting, and it may be of assumed, tenderness have, in a great degree, sufficed to efface twenty long years of watchfulness, of care, and of self-abnegation; and they have not only rent away her right to be the first and best beloved, but they have also deprived her of the filial caresses, the gentle attention, and the adored presence of the heart's idol, whom she has herself given to him for life. Nothing is left to the mother but the attachment of respect. All warmer emotions are engrossed by the husband, to whom his young

home without regret, to follow his fortunes to the end of the world; if she does not love him, she will still perform the same duty with resignation. Nature and law alike impose the obligation on her, and her own heart must decide whether it will constitute her joy or her trial; but in either case the result to the mother is the same. Nor can that mother reproach her with this painful preference, for she has reared her in the conviction of the necessity of marriage; she has herself offered to her its example in her own person; Heaven itself has pointed it out as a duty whose omission is culpable; and, therefore, far from venturing to wish that the lost one should restore to her all the tenderness which time and habit may enable her to withdraw from her husband, the mother is bound, on the contrary, to pray that they may every day become dearer to each other, and by each other, even at the expense of her own happiness. This misfortune is the mother's last blessing.- Women, by Louis Desnoyers.

O

A VISIT TO POPE'S VILLA. "We took a boat," says Niebuhr, the German historian, writing in 1798, "across the Thames, and I made a pilgrimage to Twickenham to see Pope's garden. that I could thus visit with you the monuments of those men whose memory excites a wish to have lived in those times! The monument he erected to the mother he so dearly loved still stands; but the cypresses that he planted round it have all died out, except two which still show here and there a green shoot. Hedges and old-fashioned flower-beds occupy the left side of the garden, and in the center stands a bower, the trees of which have now grown to a gigantic height, and with the recollection of the great men who once trod the sward, inspire the awe of a sacred grove. They who will may call the grotto, the cool retreat in which Pope loved to sit with his most intimate friends, a toy-to me it was more. The prospect it commands must be allowed by all to be enchantingly beautiful-the Thames and its incomparably charming banks. Before the grotto stood an old weeping willow, now almost dead, and propped up with care, also from Pope's times."