e,
This drear accursed masonry,
Where e'en the welcome daylight strains
But duskly through the painted panes,
Hemmed in by many a toppling heap
Of books worm-eaten, grey with dust,
Which to the vaulted ceiling creep
Against the smoky paper thrust,
With glasses, boxes, round me stacked
And instruments together hurled,
Ancestral lumber stuffed and packed--
Such is my world! And what a world!...
Alas! In living Nature's stead,
Where God his human creatures set,
In smoke and mould the fleshless dead
And bones of beasts surround me yet.

He takes up the book of the Mystic astrologer Nostradamus and sees in it
the sign, or cipher, of the universe. As he gazes a wondrous vision
reveals itself: the mystic lines of the cipher seem to live and move and
to form one living whole; and in spirit he beholds the Powers of Nature
ascending and descending and reaching to each other golden vessels
filled with the waters of life and wafting with their wings blessing and
harmony through the universe.

And yet from this vision he turns away dissatisfied:

What wondrous vision! yet a vision only!
Where shall I grasp thee, Nature infinite?

And from this cipher of the material universe, this vision of
inconceivable immensity and infinite diversity, the human spirit which
is not content with the dead bones of science and has entered into
communion with Nature cannot but turn away dissatisfied--and even with
despair. Let me try to illustrate this in a more matter-of-fact way.

The human mind discovers, let us say, that the earth is not the centre
of the universe; that the sun is larger than the 'bottom of a cask,' as
in the old legend Faust discovered it to be; that there are other worlds
quite as large as ours; that this earth of ours is a good deal smaller
than the sun and actually revolves round it; that even the sun itself is
not the centre of the universe but one of many suns--one of the
countless stars in that enormous starry wreath that surrounds us, and
which we call the Milky Way. And we direct our telescopes to this Milky
Way and find that what we took for nebula is for the most part an
accumulation of countless millions of suns, each perhaps with its
planets. Then, as we sweep the sky with our glass, we discover
numberless little wreath-like spiral cloudlets, and find that they also
are just such wreaths of countless millions of suns and solar systems,
and