ling men of business, what is really your highest joy,--your piles of
gold, your marble palaces; or the pleasures of your homes, the
approbation of your consciences, your hopes of future bliss? Yes, you
are dreamers, like poets and philosophers, when you call yourselves
pack-horses. Even you are only sustained in labor by intangible rewards
that you can neither see nor feel. The most practical of men and women
can really only live in those ideas which are deemed indefinite and
unreal. For what do the busiest of you run away from money-making, and
ride in cold or heat, in dreariness or discomfort,--dinners, or
greetings of love and sympathy? On what are such festivals as Christmas
and Thanksgiving Day based?--on consecrated sentiments that have more
force than any material gains or ends. These, after all, are realities
to you as much as ideas were to Plato, or music to Beethoven, or
patriotism to Washington. Deny these as the higher certitudes, and you
rob the soul of its dignity, and life of its consolations.

AUTHORITIES.

Bacon's Works, edited by Basil Montagu; Bacon's Life, by Basil Montagu;
Bacon's Life, by James Spedding; Bacon's Life, by Thomas Fowler; Dr.
Abbott's Introduction to Bacon's Essays, in Contemporary Review, 1876;
Macaulay's famous essay in Edinburgh Review, 1839; Archbishop Whately's
annotations of the Essays of Bacon; the general Histories of England.

GALILEO.

* * * * *

A.D. 1564-1642.

ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES.

Among the wonders of the sixteenth century was the appearance of a new
star in the northern horizon, which, shining at first with a feeble
light, gradually surpassed the brightness of the planet Jupiter; and
then changing its color from white to yellow and from yellow to red,
after seventeen months, faded away from the sight, and has not since
appeared. This celebrated star, first seen by Tycho Brahe in the
constellation Cassiopeia, never changed its position, or presented the
slightest perceptible parallax. It could not therefore have been a
meteor, nor a planet regularly revolving round the sun, nor a comet
blazing with fiery nebulous light, nor a satellite of one of the
planets, but a fixed star, far beyond our solar system. Such a
phenomenon created an immense sensation, and has never since been
satisfactorily explained by philosophers. In the infancy of astronomical
science it was regarded by astrologers as a sign to portend the birth of
an