Complete. “The Wonders of the Heavens,” Book I., Chap. i., translated by Mrs. Norman Lockyer.

O NIGHT, how sublime is thy language to me!… Where are the souls to whom the spectacle of starry night is not an eloquent discourse? Where are those who have not been sometimes arrested in the presence of the bright worlds which hover over our heads, and who have not sought for the key of the great enigma of creation? The solitary hours of night are in truth the most beautiful of all our hours, those in which we have the faculty of placing ourselves in intimate communication with great and holy Nature. Far from spreading a veil over the universe, as is sometimes said, they only efface those which the sun produces in the atmosphere. The orb of day conceals from us the splendors of the firmament; it is during the night that the panoramas of the sky are open to us. “At the hour of midnight the heavenly vault is strewn with stars, like isles of light in the midst of an ocean extending over our heads. Who can contemplate them and bring back his looks to the earth without feeling sad regrets, and without longing for wings in order to take flight and be blended with them, or be lost amid their immortal light?”

  In the midst of darkness our eyes gaze freely on the sky, piercing the deep azure of the apparent vault, above which the stars shine. They traverse the white constellated regions, visiting distant regions of space, where the most brilliant stars lose their brightness by distance; they go beyond this unexplored expanse, and mount still higher, as far as those faint nebulæ whose diffused brightness seems to mark the limits of the visible. In this immense passage of sight, Thought with rapid wings accompanies the forerunning visual ray, carried away by its flight and wonderingly contemplating these distant splendors. The purity of the heavenly prospect awakens that eternal predisposition to melancholy which dwells in the depths of our souls, and soon the spectacle absorbs us in a vague and indefinable reverie. It is then that thousands of questions spring up in our minds, and that a thousand points of interrogation rise to our sight. The problem of creation is a great problem! The science of the stars is an immense science; its mission is to embrace the universality of created things! At the remembrance of these impressions, does it not appear that the man who does not feel any sentiment of admiration before the picture of the starry splendor, is not yet worthy of receiving on his brow the crown of intelligence?

  Night is, in truth, the hour of solitude, in which the contemplative soul is regenerated in the universal peace. We become ourselves; we are separated from the factitious life of the world, and placed in the closest communion with nature and with truth.

  Of all the sciences, Astronomy is the one which can enlighten us best on our relative value, and make us understand the relation which connects the Earth with the rest of creation. Without it, as the history of past centuries testifies, it is impossible for us to know where we are or who we are, or to establish an instructive comparison between the place which we occupy in space and the whole of the universe; without it we should be both ignorant of the actual extent of our country, its nature, and the order to which it belongs. Inclosed in the dark meshes of ignorance, we cannot form the slightest idea of the general arrangement of the world; a thick fog covers the narrow horizon which contains us, and our mind remains incapable of soaring above the daily theatre of life, and of going beyond the narrow sphere traced by the limits of the action of our senses. On the other hand, when the torch of the Science of the Worlds enlightens us, the scene changes, the vapors which darkened the horizon fade away, our mistaken eyes contemplate in the serenity of a pure sky the immense work of the Creator. The Earth appears like a globe poised under our steps; thousands of similar globes are rocked in ether; the world enlarges in proportion as the power of our examination increases, and from that time universal creation develops itself before us in its reality, establishing both our rank and our relation with the numerous similar worlds which constitute the universe.

  The silence and profound peace of a starry night present an appropriate scene to our contemplative faculty, and no time is more propitious for the elevation of the soul toward the beauties of the heavens. But the poetry of the sight of these appearances will be soon surpassed by the magnificence of the reality. And it is on this point that we must first insist, in order to get rid of all delusions caused by the senses. It seems to me right to remove the causes of error which may leave false impressions on our minds; it is completely useless, if not dangerous, to devote the first part of an astronomical discourse to describing apparent phenomena, which will afterward have to be proved false. Let us not follow this troublesome road; let us keep away from the ordinary path, and begin, on the contrary, by raising the veil, in order to allow the reality to shine. Poetry, whose harmonious breath has just hushed our suspended souls, will not vanish on that account; it will rather regain a fresh aspect and new life, and, above all, a greater energy. Fiction can never be superior to truth; the latter is a source of inspiration to us, richer and more fruitful than the former.