and nothing disturbs the solemnity of the silence, which reigns there, but the occasional falling of the rocks into the bay; and the voices of the various seabirds, which build in their cavities. This bay was discovered by Peyrouse. The olive-coloured inhabitants of the adjacent country have no priests, no temples, nor any place of public worship. Their religion is that of the heart: and the sun seems to be the great object of their gratitude, admiration, and idolatry. But they will lean for hours over the peaks of these crags, and gaze with an interest, like that of fascination, upon the stars, reflected on the bosom of the sea below.

There might we woo SIMPLICITY,—the maid
Whom wisdom loves, and innocence adores.-
No more by wild and angry passions tost;

No more by ill-placed confidence betray'd;
No more by envy's low-bred cunning crost;

There might we hail the hour when love shall rule,
And bland affection bind the willing world.

The Fall of the Leaf.

III.

When the poet beholds the evening star, he dwells. upon the fate of Hesperus, who, journeying up Mount Atlas to observe the motions of the planets, and never returning, was fabled to have been transformed into the star of evening. When the eye glances over the group, forming Cassiopeia, we remember that splendid star, which appeared in its arena in 1572, with a size and a brilliancy equal to Jupiter, and which gradually disappeared in eighteen months:

having during that period been an object of surprise and terror to every part of Europe. When we watch,. in the middle of August, for the emersion of the dog star from the rays of the sun, we reflect, that from the rising of this, the largest and the brightest of all the stars, the Egyptians and the Ethiopians calculated the beginning of their year. When Arcturus first rises from the sun's sphere, we listen in imagination to the lyre of Iopas, singing the causes of the sun's eclipses; the varied motions of the moon; whence proceed showers and meteors; whence the rainy Hyades, and whence the bright Arcturus. When we observe an eclipse, we behold the gigantic, yet ruined, form of the lost archangel,

proudly eminent,

Standing like a tower!

When we mark the rising of a comet, the imagination
wings into the regions of infinite space; and on its
return from the excursion, dwells on the mortal
comets, with which the world has occasionally been
pestered: Cambyses in Ethiopia; Alexander in In-
dia; Brennus in Greece: Attila in Italy; Odin in
Scandinavia; and Cortez in Mexico. All of whom,
to the astonished nations, they invaded, seemed like
comets,

Which from their horrid hair
Shake pestilence and war!

Then glancing with a poet's eye, through all the circle of the hemisphere, a splendour dazzles the

imagination, far more transcendant than the magnificence of Theodoric, when he appeared in the amphitheatre of Rome, with his guards, his nobles, and his clergy, in the midst of all that was great and glorious in the world. Fulgentius gazed in silent astonishment and admiration on this splendid exhibition. "If earthly Rome," exclaimed he, at length, in an ecstasy," is so glorious as this; how much more glorious and magnificent must be the heavenly Jerusalem!—And if men are capable of being so much transported with the pomp and grandeur of this world, how much more glory and delight must the saints derive, in the pleasure they enjoy, in the contemplation of the God of Truth!”

IV.

What were the awful raptures of a Galileo, a Descartes, a Copernicus, or a Newton, no one, but those, who are conscious of a flight as soaring," are capable of conceiving. But from the smaller impulse of an humbler mind, I am persuaded, my Lelius, that they assimilated in a much higher degree, than ourselves, with those of the Eternal mind. You, my friend, have a high delight, as I have often heard you declare, in the cultivation of astronomical science. For my own part, I am ready to confess, that, after venturing into the ocean of infinity, I desisted for some time out of pure cowardice. Satellites, planets, and suns, hanging on their centres in the arched void of Heaven by a single law; and systems, connected

to each other by the revolution of comets,-all floating in the vast ocean of infinity,-were far too vast, too mystic and magnificent, for a mental ray, so limited as mine.'-Passing the bounds of place and time (flammantia mænia mundi), I could glance from earth to Heaven, and give to the various orbs their various appellations, and calculate their courses.But when I began to perceive, that the work of creation is always going on;2 that the alteration of one system produces the germination of another; that though light travels with an almost incredible swiftness, there exist bodies, which, from their immensity of distance, have not yet visited the eye of the astronomer; when I began to perceive, that even if it were possible to transport myself to the most distant of those orbs, which are unmeasured suns to immeasurable systems, I should then be only standing in the vestibule of Nature, and on the frontiers of the creation, imagination ceased to have the power to soar feeling became painful; and the faculty of thought, by being too much extended, wasted into nothing. By seeking to know too much, we voyage out to sea without a compass, and become bewildered

"The progress of astronomy," says Laplace," has been the constant triumph of philosophy over the illusions of the senses."-In some studies, the imagination can supply what is wanting to perfection :in astronomy, imagination is in itself nothing :-t is, as it were, less than nothing.

2 Vide Herschell's paper on the Sidereal Heavens. Philosoph. Trans. for 1814, p. 248.

and confounded!-Like the peasant of the Alps, we gain nothing by our search:

"Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.""

I have searched the depths of caverns; I have thrilled beneath high and impending rocks; I have contemplated the vastness of the ocean; and climbed one mountain, while the sun has risen from behind another, and all around has been one continued scene of wonder and glory. In those moments, I have been lost in admiration and astonishment, at the power of that tremendous Being, who alone was capable of forming such gigantic works as those. But what are high and impending rocks; what are the giant heavings of an angry ocean; and what the proudest summit of the Andes; when placed in the scale of such interminable vastness, as the creating, balancing, and peopling of innumerable globes? In contemplating systems, so infinite, who can forbear exclaiming,2 2 "What a mole-hill is our earth, and how insignificant are we, who creep so proudly on her surface?"

1 Scienter nescius, et sapienter indoctus.

Grotius has a similar passage :

Nescire quædam magna pars sapientiæ est.

St. Gregory said of St. Benedict, “Recessit scienter nescieus, et sapienter indoctus."

2 Lambert.