nomical faith, or on a feeble apprehension of the glorious destinies of our species. The difference between the poetry inspired by the satellite of silver and the stars of adamant can have no relation, as has been supposed, to our ideas of distance or number. Were the moon a ball of marble in our upper atmosphere, chiseled by the sculptor into her rounded hollows and her mountain ridges or were it a Cheshire cheese at a lower level, dimpled by the fingers of the dairymaid, she would still be invested with all the poetical feelings with which her light is associated. To the vulgar, or to the merely poetical eye, the stars appear as close to us as the moon; and whether we contemplate them merely as solitary lights in the firmament, or as grouped into brilliant constellations, they suggest none of those ideas of deep feeling and sublime emotion which are associated with the past, the present, and the future condition of our race. Their feeble and glimmering ray, dimmed by each rising exhalation, and paling even before the zephyr's breath, has failed to arrest the eye of the poet, or to stud the canvas of the painter. It has never gilded the ripple of the mountain lake, nor crested with silver the ocean wave. It has never lighted the lover to his mistress, nor the pilgrim to his shrine, nor the hero to his deed of glory. But no sooner does philosophy, with her magic wand, marshal the starry host, and arrange their planets and satellites into the glorious systems of worlds which fill the immensity of space, than faith "takes up the wondrous tale," and associates with these bright abodes the future fortunes of immortal and regenerated man. It places there the loved and the lost-it follows them into the celestial bowers-it joins them in the anthem to "mortal minstrelsy unknown"-it listens to their welcoming or their warning voice; and while it gives a visible locality to the home of many mansions, it assembles round its joyous hearth hearts once severed and broken; and longs to wander beside the "rivers of the waters of life," with the sages that enlightened it-the prophets that expounded it-the warriors that fought for it-the martyrs that suffered for it-and the noble victims that bled in its cause. The poetry of death and the grave is thus succeeded by the loftier strains of the Resurrection and the Life; and the fountain of Helicon is thus made to draw its purest waters from springs that rise from below, and from dews that descend from above.

exalted kind are awakened by the contemplation of the stars as the future abode of the blest, they can bear no relation to the beauty and grandeur of the objects themselves. They derive their character as well as their power from their association with life in all its phases of grief or joy, and with human interests and passions in all their reckless energy or heavenward aspirations. Sirius, the brightest of the stars, radiating in succession all the hues of the rainbow, and Saturn, the most interesting of the planets, girded with his noble ring, and enlightened by his seven satellites, have in themselves no more of the spirit of poetry than a charcoal point ignited by electricity, or a gas-illuminated representation of the planet.* But no sooner do we regard Sirius as the sun which enlightens by its rays and guides by its mass a system of planetary worlds; and no sooner is Saturn viewed as a habitable globe, the residence of intellectual and immortal beings, and illuminated by seven moons which give them light in the absence of the sun, than the sensation in the membrane of the eye is transferred to the tablet of the heart, and all the sympathies of our nature surround the conception of worlds more glorious, and of races more numerous and noble than our own. The imagination takes up the theme where reason and analogy leave it, and the living and breathing universe of the poet offers to the child of clay eternity in exchange for time-to the man of sorrows a refuge from the storms and earthquakes around him-to the sage the fellowship of angels-and to the saint the guardian care of the seraph and the cherubim. The chariots of flame and the horses of fire that bore Elijah from his star of earth, and surrounded Elisha on the mountains of Syria, and the wheels of amber and of fire which were exhibited to the captive prophet on the banks of the Chebar, become, in the poet's eye, the vehicle from planet to planet, and from star to star, in which the heavenly host is to survey the wonders and glories of the uni

verse.