thousand stages each a hundred million miles wide, and you reach
the nearest fixed stars, for instance, the constellation of the
Lyre. Multiply that inconceivable distance by hundreds of
thousands, and still you will discern enormous sand banks of stars
obscurely glittering on the farthest verge of telescopic vision.
And even all this is but a little corner of the whole.

Coleridge once said, "To some infinitely superior Being, the whole
universe may be as one plain, the distance between planet and
planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces
between system and system no greater than the intervals between
one grain and the grain adjacent." One of the vastest thoughts yet
conceived by any mortal mind is that of turning the universe from
a mechanical to a chemical problem, as illustrated by Prof.
Lovering.29 Assuming the acknowledged truths in physics, that the
ultimate particles of matter never actually touch each other, and
that water in evaporating expands into eighteen hundred times its
previous volume, he demonstrates that the porosity of our solar
system is no greater than that of steam. "The porosity of granite
or gold may be equal to that of steam,

29 Cambridge Miscellany, 1842.

the greater density being a stronger energy in the central
forces." And the conclusion is scientifically reached that "the
vast interval between the sun and Herschel is an enormous pore,
while the invisible distance that separates the most closely
nestled atoms is a planetary space, a stupendous gulf when
compared with the little spheres between which it flows." Thus we
may think of the entire universe as a living organism, like a
ripening orange, its component atoms worlds, the sidereal
movements its vital circulation.

Surely, when a man looks up from his familiar fields and household
roof to such incommensurable objects as scientific imagination
reveals in the sparkling sword handle of Perseus and the hazy
girdle of Andromeda, overpowering humility will fill his breast,
an unutterable solemnity will "fall on him as from the very
presence chamber of the Highest." And will he not, when he
contemplates the dust like shoals of stars, the shining films of
firmaments, that retreat and hover through all the boundless
heights, the Nubecula nebula, looking like a bunch of ribbons
disposed in a true love's knot, that most awful nebula whirled
into the shape and bearing the name of the Dumb Bell, the Crab
nebula,