This World Has Many Rings, Like Saturn, And We Live Now On The
Outmost Of Them All.
None can say deliberately that he inhabits
the same sphere, or is contemporary with, the flower which his
hands have plucked, and though his feet may seem to crush it,
inconceivable spaces and ages separate them, and perchance there
is no danger that he will hurt it.
What do the botanists know?
Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may
see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born,
and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon and
stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least.
That is a pathetic inquiry among travellers and geographers after
the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they think it is.
When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the
place it occupied!
The anecdotes of modern astronomy affect me in the same way as do
those faint revelations of the Real which are vouchsafed to men
from time to time, or rather from eternity to eternity. When I
remember the history of that faint light in our firmament, which
we call Venus, which ancient men regarded, and which most modern
men still regard, as a bright spark attached to a hollow sphere
revolving about our earth, but which we have discovered to be
_another world_, in itself, - how Copernicus, reasoning long and
patiently about the matter, predicted confidently concerning it,
before yet the telescope had been invented, that if ever men came
to see it more clearly than they did then, they would discover
that it had phases like our moon, and that within a century after
his death the telescope was invented, and that prediction
verified, by Galileo, - I am not without hope that we may, even
here and now obtain some accurate information concerning that
OTHER WORLD which the instinct of mankind has so long predicted.
Indeed, all that we call science, as well as all that we call
poetry, is a particle of such information, accurate as far as it
goes, though it be but to the confines of the truth.
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