of the shining hosts, and then lets him down with some arrowy word of beauty sticking in his heart. These commendations, such as they are, apply equally well to the work the title of which is put at the head of this article, and to that which was reviewed in our May number. It is, therefore, not surprising that many a literary man, to say nothing of the more general student still, has drawn all his astronomical knowledge, and also the germs of all his astronomical emotion, from these splendid books; for they present the scientific competency of Herschel, in combination with much of the oratorical magnificence and glowing humanity of Chalmers. Since this is the scientific age of human history, since, therefore, no man can properly belong to this age unless he be more or less initiated into the method and substance of science, and since it surely behoves every really living soul to drink into the spirit of his age, it is a matter of first-rate importance that the young should be led into the new temple by the hand of wisdom. Understanding all the sinister tendencies of an excess of the merely scientific life, the good teacher will counteract them, by means of poetic enthusiasm, and also, still more effectually, by means of spiritual self-possession. Otherwise the tree of science may prove a poison-tree, as it has frequently done; and thence the recoil of some spiritual-minded men, such as Arnold, as well as of certain poets, such as Wordsworth, from the instruction of the unfledged in the principles of analytical knowledge. It is easy, however, to misunderstand this greatly important subject. In order to the bringing of a complete man out of a young creature born in this age, the example and the precept of that which is indeed spiritual in religion cannot but be the principal means, for his spiritual nature is what is deepest, and, therefore, most distinctive, in man. Next to religion should come the manifold influence of art, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and especially poetry; for art speaks to the imaginative instinct, which is as peculiarly human as the god-ward affections of the soul, although it is posterior to worship, and there must be holiness before the perception of its beauty. Tuition in science could not easily injure the living foundations of such an embryon, while it is absolutely necessary to the communication of firmness and accuracy of outline, of extension and solidity, of flesh and blood. The study of philosophy proper, that highest knowledge which ignores the facts and general conceptions of science, and deals only with ideas, were the complement and completion of so liberal and Christian an education. But so fair an ideal is never to be realized in its perfection; and, therefore, all that can be meant, when one speaks of a complete man, is a man in whom the several germs of humanity proper have all been somewhat elicited by culture. Religion, art, science, and philosophy must work together with the unshrinking practice and sufferance of life, in order to give the world assurance of a man; and the very mention of practical life reminds us how lamentably few children can possibly reap the benefit of this idea of education-an idea which is almost as old as it is inapplicable, until the coming of a better political and social day than this. But the higher class of teachers, whether clerical or secular, might and should; and especially those authors who write on grave subjects for the people and the young. It is because Professor Nichol approximates to this humane and congenial type in a very rare degree, that we have offered these hints in connexion with his name: more especially because we remember that he published a Christmas book on The Stellar Universe,' some three years ago, intended for the use of children. The initiation of the British boy into the marvels and huge conceptions of astronomy, and into the hero-worship of Isaac Newton, can scarcely fail to constitute an epoch in his life, although it may not come by observation. We remember our own introduction well. It was through the medium of Chalmers' astronomical discourses, prematurely read, though somewhat prepared for them by a venerable father's lessons. We had even lent our aid to the paternal hand in the construction of a rude diagram of the solar system on the sea-shore, and seen it washed out by the flowing tide. But the hold that the great preacher's revolving career of explication took on our youthful mind can never be forgotten. Like a rushing wind, it sucked us up the welkin, in a state of intellectual intoxication with the joy of new images, new fears, new hopes, and new thoughts without end. One summer evening soon afterwards, we had been playing long and lustily at hide-and-seek, and when our companions had gone home to their beds, we lay down supine in an empty cart near the house. The city of God came out unawares. There, overhead, were the abysses full of stars, many-sized and many-coloured, stretching from before the eye; with beginning, but with no seen ceivable end; with ponderous speed that made the head dizzy to think of it; with splendour, which distance alone rendered endurable; and all swathed in that fathomless, billowless, speechless night! Morbidly feeling ourselves drawn towards the centre of the earth by gravitation, we could not move, till a sudden panic of awe drove us home in terror. punctual house-mother had been spending the evening at a neighbour's, but had just returned in time. We ran to her knees and, kneeling unbid to say our prayers at her feet, could not find a word to say, but burst into a passion of tears, hiding or con The our head with sobs in the warm lap; and that hour of feeling had its share in the shaping of more lives than one. Uplifting and altogether satisfactory as is the consideration of the solar system and its general relation to the heavens, it is not until the mind is raised to the study of the firmamental astronomy, as it is now called, that the universe of stars, planets, moons, comets, and meteors, arises on the prostrate soul with all its power. Our wondrous system is but a speck after all. The sun, carrying all his satellites along with him as easily as the earth carries her solitary moon, moves around or towards what cosmical centre its silent Creator only knows; but, as it appears to us upon this world, it is in the direction of Hercules, a wellknown quarter of the milky-way. And that classical milkyway is now known and understood to be one vast organism of solar systems, possessed of an outward shape, as well as of an inward structure. Within it, suns are arranged into many particular combinations; and its exterior form is as unique as it is unexpected. Innumerable solar systems, thrown into organic groups, are bound together in one vast community by the force of gravitation; and our solar system is only a particle, our earth only an atom, of this multitudinous firmament. The distances of solar system from solar system, within the awful limits of the milky-way, are stupendous. The nearest are so remote that only a very few have been computed. Bessel's star in that group of our firmament which is called the Swan, is 670,000 times more distant from the terrestrial sun than the earth; and yet the earth is some 79,560,000 miles from that sun. A bright star in the Lyre, another group or constellation of solar systems, is thrice as remote as Bessel's; light takes thirty years to run from its surface to our eyes, taking only eight minutes to come from the sun; yet both the Lyre and the Swan are comparatively near at hand. What is to be thought of those stars which blaze upon the farthest confines of the old milky-way? But our firmament is not the universe. It probably bears as small a proportion in size, complexity, and glory to that immeasurable and indefinable thing, as the solar system to itself, or the terrestrial moon to the solar system. It appears that there are other firmaments, as remote from ours in proportion to their sublime dimensions, as the stars of our firmament from one another. There is no visible end to the number of them, indeed, nor to their variety, nor to their unfolding. Each nebula seems to be a true firmament of stars. As the nature of the case renders it impossible for human observation to reach the limits of the architecture of the heavens, it also appears to be inconceivable by man that the heavens should have any limits at all. The true outside of the starry fabric is not to be thought of even by the imagination. It is too terrible. It transcends conception. The mind is literally lost in the attempt. Once launched among the stars the voyage knows no end. New world is beyond new world in an interminable succession. The eye of man has never reached the place where nothing is; and it cannot attempt to reach it, even as the eye of the mind. It can only close itself in faith. The scientific imagination may conceive of the solar system as a celestial compound particle, of which the atoms are sun, planets, and moons; of a constellation as a celestial crystal, with solar systems for its molecular constituents; and of a firmament as a celestial rock, whose crystals are constellations. But the whole universe of such firmaments, heaving, rolling, sending up starry spray, and rushing up and down the steeps of space, is suggestive of a greater image still. It is an ocean of the manifested might, splendour, and self-possession of Him who dared to send it resounding from the foot of his throne. It is wonderful to the poet that the astronomer does not absolutely and for ever lose himself, when plunged among its fiery-crested waves. It is strange that he retains his personality after having spurned the solar bounds and dashed beyond the milky-way, rushing on from firmament to firmament, from nebula to nebula, along the shifting levels of the shining tide. O perilous swimmer, come, come back again! It would be out of place to attempt a more formal exposition of the astonishing revelations of the Firmamental Astronomy. Suffice it, that the principal mover in this glorious new development was our adopted countryman, William Herschel; while his ideas and labours are being fulfilled and extended by as noble a band of explorers as ever adventured into the depths of nature; as the reader will find, in the perusal of the great popular work, which has started these thoughts and aspirations. As for the book itself, we should now leave it with the public, having accorded it our unfeigned commendation, but for a novel and peculiar feature, to which we have not yet adverted. This popular treatise, though strictly a scientific production, is actually furnished with a series of poetic designs. A great artist has expressed the emotions of firmamental science, at least as they moved within his own bosom, in his proper and personal dialect of the universal language of pictorial art; and his drawings constitute the illustrations of this astronomical exposition. The plastic arts have almost always been employed in illustrating each other. Architecture and poetry have been heightened and set forth by sculpture and painting; and so have the poetic incidents of history and romance. Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry have all been rendered auxiliary to that which is poetical or beautiful in religion. But the illustration of science by artistical forms is an absolute novelty. Darwin and his followers, indeed, did all they could to wed poetry and science; but they failed. Yet science is not incapable of so high and pure a union any more than religion-any more, we mean, in kind, not in degree; for religion is supreme and central, sitting with the poetries for her handmaidens, and the sciences for her lords, while the useful arts are the busy citizens of her ideal commonwealth. There is what is beautiful in science, and there is what is properly and peculiarly beautiful in the several sciences. If the internal and solid substance of science is orderly and grand, rather than beautiful, yet its surfaces, whereon the light of religion or of art may be suffered to play, are iridescent with as many hues as there are in the heavens themselves. Then the borderland between science and nescience is ever a region of twilight and wonder, mystery and apprehension, sublimity and homeless thoughts, baffled intellect, the terrible beauty of awe, hoping against hope, the choice between faith and defiance, and also sometimes the very euthanasy of love. Lastly, the emotional history of science, like that of all human conflict and victory, is eminently capable of being made the body and vehicle of artistic soul. In short, the points of contact-let us rather say the places of interdiffusion-between science and art, are many; and it only wants the eye of genius to descry them. It will sound strangely in some ears, but it has long appeared to us that Tennyson is a poet penetrated to the core, even if he know it not, by the scientific culture of his age. Emerson is also the poet of science in no small degree. Browning is scientific in method, though not in matter. Bailey uses the results of science, as freely as other bards have been wont to use the first appearances of nature, in the upbuilding of his symbolic rhyme. The same tendency is vigorously nascent, we think, in the many-gifted author of the Roman'; and it will |