same who attracted my attention the other day while I was talking, as I
mentioned. He passes most of his time in a private observatory, it
appears; a watcher of the stars. That I suppose gives the peculiar look
to his lustrous eyes. The Master knows him and was pleased to tell me
something about him.

You call yourself a Poet,--he said,--and we call you so, too, and so you
are; I read your verses and like 'em. But that young man lives in a
world beyond the imagination of poets, let me tell you. The daily home
of his thought is in illimitable space, hovering between the two
eternities. In his contemplations the divisions of time run together, as
in the thought of his Maker. With him also,--I say it not
profanely,--one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one
day.

This account of his occupation increased the interest his look had
excited in me, and I have observed him more particularly and found out
more about him. Sometimes, after a long night's watching, he looks so
pale and worn, that one would think the cold moonlight had stricken him
with some malign effluence such as it is fabled to send upon those who
sleep in it. At such times he seems more like one who has come from a
planet farther away from the sun than our earth, than like one of us
terrestrial creatures. His home is truly in the heavens, and he
practises an asceticism in the cause of science almost comparable to that
of Saint Simeon Stylites. Yet they tell me he might live in luxury if he
spent on himself what he spends on science. His knowledge is of that
strange, remote character, that it seems sometimes almost superhuman. He
knows the ridges and chasms of the moon as a surveyor knows a garden-plot
he has measured. He watches the snows that gather around the poles of
Mars; he is on the lookout for the expected comet at the moment when its
faint stain of diffused light first shows itself; he analyzes the ray
that comes from the sun's photosphere; he measures the rings of Saturn;
he counts his asteroids to see that none are missing, as the shepherd
counts the sheep in his flock. A strange unearthly being; lonely,
dwelling far apart from the thoughts and cares of the planet on which he
lives,--an enthusiast who gives his life to knowledge; a student of
antiquity, to whom the records of the geologist are modern pages in the
great volume of being, and the pyramids a memorandum of yesterday, as the
eclipse or occultation that is to