en came down in incarnations and mingled with their favorites
and rescued the earth from evils. Every thing was anthropomorphized.
Man's relative magnitude and power were believed to be such
that he fancied during an eclipse that, by screams, the crashing
of gongs, and magic rites, he could scare away the monsters

27 Pigott, Scandinavian Mythology, chap. i. p. 31.

28 Volney, Ruins, chap. xxii. sect. 3. Maurice, Hist. Hindostan,
vol. i. pp. 145-147.

who were swallowing the sun or the moon. Meteors shooting through
the evening air the Arabs believed were fallen angels trying to
get back into heaven but hurled from the crystal battlements by
the flaming lances of the guardian watchers. Then the gazer saw
"The top of heaven full of fiery shapes, Of burning cressets."

Now the student contemplates an abyss swarming with orbs each out
weighing millions of our earth. Then they read their nativities in
the planets and felt how great must be the state overwatched by
such resplendent servitors. Now "They seek communion with the stars
that they may know How petty is this ball on which they come and go."

Then the hugest view of the extent of the universal sphere was
that an iron mass would require nine days and nights to plunge
from its Olympian height to its Tartarean depth. Now we are told
by the masters of science that there are stars so distant that it
would take their light, travelling at a rate of nearly twelve
million miles a minute, thirty million years to reach us. The
telescope has multiplied the size of the creation by hundreds of
millions, and the grandest conception of the stellar universe
possible to the most capacious human mind probably bears no larger
proportion to the fact than an orrery does to the solar system.
Our earth is a hundred million miles from the sun, whose diameter
is so monstrous that a hundred such orbs strung in a straight line
would occupy the whole distance. The sun, with all his attendant
planets and moons, is sweeping around his own centre supposed by
some to be Alcyone at the rate of four hundred thousand miles a
day; and it will take him eighteen million years to complete one
revolution. Our firmamental cluster contains, it has been
calculated, in round numbers about twenty million stars. There are
many thousands of such nebula visible, some of them capable of
packing away in their awful bosoms hundreds of thousands of our
galaxies. Measure off the abysmal space into seven hundred