said the poet: but what is that
to drawing down worlds!'

'I often experience a kind of fear of the sky after sitting in the
observing-chair a long time,' he answered. 'And when I walk home
afterwards I also fear it, for what I know is there, but cannot see, as
one naturally fears the presence of a vast formless something that only
reveals a very little of itself. That's partly what I meant by saying
that magnitude, which up to a certain point has grandeur, has beyond it
ghastliness.'

Thus the interest of their sidereal observations led them on, till the
knowledge that scarce any other human vision was travelling within a
hundred million miles of their own gave them such a sense of the
isolation of that faculty as almost to be a sense of isolation in respect
of their whole personality, causing a shudder at its absoluteness. At
night, when human discords and harmonies are hushed, in a general sense,
for the greater part of twelve hours, there is nothing to moderate the
blow with which the infinitely great, the stellar universe, strikes down
upon the infinitely little, the mind of the beholder; and this was the
case now. Having got closer to immensity than their fellow-creatures,
they saw at once its beauty and its frightfulness. They more and more
felt the contrast between their own tiny magnitudes and those among which
they had recklessly plunged, till they were oppressed with the presence
of a vastness they could not cope with even as an idea, and which hung
about them like a nightmare.

He stood by her while she observed; she by him when they changed places.
Once that Swithin's emancipation from a trammelling body had been
effected by the telescope, and he was well away in space, she felt her
influence over him diminishing to nothing. He was quite unconscious of
his terrestrial neighbourings, and of herself as one of them. It still
further reduced her towards unvarnished simplicity in her manner to him.

The silence was broken only by the ticking of the clock-work which gave
diurnal motion to the instrument. The stars moved on, the end of the
telescope followed, but their tongues stood still. To expect that he was
ever voluntarily going to end the pause by speech was apparently futile.
She laid her hand upon his arm.

He started, withdrew his eye from the telescope, and brought himself back
to the earth by a visible--almost painful--effort.

'Do come out of it,' she coaxed, with a softness in her voic