open heavens round our Sun.

Imagine a magnificent aerostat, lightly and rapidly cleaving space.
Surround it with eight little balloons of different sizes, the smallest
like those sold on the streets for children to play with, the larger,
such as are distributed for a bonus in large stores. Imagine this group
sailing through the air, and you have the system of our worlds in
miniature.

Still, this is only an image, a comparison. The balloons are held up by
the atmosphere, in which they float at equilibrium. The Earth is
sustained by nothing material. What maintains her in equilibrium is the
ethereal void; an immaterial force; gravitation. The Sun attracts her,
and if she did not revolve, she would drop into him; but rotating round
him, at a speed of 107,000 kilometers[2] (about 66,000 miles) per hour,
she produces a centrifugal force, like that of a stone in a sling, that
is precisely equivalent, and of contrary sign, to its gravitation toward
the central orb, and these two equilibrated forces keep her at the same
medium distance.

This solar and planetary group does not exist solitary in the immense
void that extends indefinitely around us. As we said above, each star
that we admire in the depths of the sky, and to which we lift up our
eyes and thoughts during the charmed hours of the night, is another sun
burning with its own light, the chief of a more or less numerous family,
such as are multiplied through all space to infinity. Notwithstanding
the immense distances between the sun-stars, Space is so vast, and the
number of these so great, that by an effect of perspective due solely to
the distance, appearances would lead us to believe that the stars were
touching. And under certain telescopic aspects, and in some of the
astral photographs, they really do appear to be contiguous.

The Universe is infinite. Space is limitless. If our love for the
Heavens should incite in us the impulse, and provide us with the means
of undertaking a journey directed to the ends of Heaven as its goal, we
should be astonished, on arriving at the confines of the Milky Way, to
see the grandiose and phenomenal spectacle of a new Universe unfold
before our dazzled eyes; and if in our mad career we crossed this new
archipelago of worlds to seek the barriers of Heaven beyond them, we
should still find universe eternally succeeding to universe before us.
Millions of suns roll on in the immensities of Space. Everywhere, on all
sides, Creat