Grief must have its way, but not all its way, and there is a time when even the consolations of religion may be intermitted with advantage, and the heart be suffered to lie fallow, wholly disengaged from any eubject that concerns itself. This is not the place to speak of the supreme blessedness of the Book of books; but the benefits which it imparts are totally different from, as they are infinitely greater than, those which flow from books in general. True, it mitigates, comforts, elevates, works unspeakable good every way,-but it does not prevent that selfconsciousness, the abrogation of which we are just now alone considering, so much as do other kinds of books, into which, perhaps, devotion hardly enters at all. charm works well for all. Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind. We wonder how folks in trouble did without them in old time, just as our descendants will wonder how men and women and children bore to see their limbs sawn off without the Lethe-balm which the mere smelling to a sponge can bestow. Action was not always possible, even to the warrior, and still less to the warrior's wife; there were years of peace; there were long nights, nights, too, of unmitigated darkness, wherein their sorrows must have made themselves felt indeed; yet they could never" take up a book,"—that is a phrase in common use among even those of us who are least given to reading, and while the dreary hours away. It is not a very high claim that is here set forth on behalf of literature,- I am writing of the obligation which we that of Pass-time, and yet what a blessed owe to literature, and not to religion; yet boon even that is! Conceive the hours of in-I cannot but feel "thankful"-using the ertia (a thing different from idleness) that it word in its ordinary and devotional sensehas mercifully consumed for us-hours to many a book which is no sermon, nor wherein nothing could be done, nothing, per- tract, nor commentary, nor anything of that haps, be thought, of our own selves, by rea-kind at all. Thus, I have cause to revere son of some impending calamity. Wisely the name of Defoe, who reached his hand does the dentist furnish his hateful ante-cham-down through a century and a half to wipe ber with books of all sorts. Who could away bitter tears from my childish eyes. The abide for an hour in such an apartment with going back to school was always a dreadful nothing to occupy his thoughts save the ex- woe to me, casting its black shadow far into pectation of that wrench to come! Whatever the latter part of my brief holidays. I have makes you forget an impending surgical op- had my share of suffering and sorrow since, eration--even though it be tooth-drawing-like other men; but I have seldom felt so will make you forget anything. This may absolutely wretched as when, a little boy, I seem derogatory to the majesty and disinter- was about to exchange my pleasant homeestedness of the human mind, but it is un-life for the hardships and uncongenialities of doubtedly true. A great and wise man has school. Vain, as black Monday approached, told us that no philanthropist would be so were the increased tendernesses of iny mothmuch kept awake at night by the news that er; the "treats" devised to cheat me of the empire of China, with its third of the forebodings dire; you might as well have human race or so, had been swallowed up by spread a banquet for some wretched doomed the sea, as by the knowledge that he was to one upon the scaffold, and asked him to sit have the tip of his own little finger amputat-down and eat, forgetful of the drop," be ed before breakfast. cause you had covered it decently with a And, indeed, it must be confessed that damask table-cloth. And yet, I protest, I where books fail as an anodyne is rather had but to take up" Robinson Crusoe," and in cases of physical than of mental pain. in a very few minutes I was out of all thought Through the long watches of the night, and of the approaching calamity; Dr. Birch and by the bedside of some slowly dying dear one, his young friends (who were not mine) loomed it is easier to obtain forgetfulness-the only no more in the near horizon. I had travelled kind of rest that it may be safe or possible over a thousand leagues of sea; I was in my to take--by means of reading than to do so snug, well-fortified cave, with the ladder upon when one is troubled with mere toothache the right side of it, "so that neither man Nor does this arise from selfishness, since nor beast could get at me," with my half a we would endure twenty toothaches, if they dozen muskets loaded, and my powder dismight give ease to the sufferer,-but because tributed in separate parcels, so that not even the sharpness of the pang prevents our apply- a thunderbolt should do me any irreparable ing our mind to anything else; while the injury. Or, if not quite so secure, I was deep full sorrow of the soul permits an inter-visiting my summer plantation among my vening thought, and over it slides another, goats and corn, or shooting, in the still astonand then another, until a layer of such is ished woods, birds of marvellous beauty; or formed, and the mind of the reader gets lying upon my stomach upon the top of the wholly free for a brief but blessed time, par-hill, watching through my spy-glass the sav titioned off, as it were, from his real trouble. ages putting to sea, and not displeased to find myself once more alone in my own little island. No living human being could just then have done me such a service as dead Defoe, unless, perhaps, it had been Dr. Birch himself, by dying opportunely, and thereby indefinitely proroguing that fatal reassembling day. Again, during that agonizing period which intervened between my proposal of marriage by letter to Jemima Anne, and my reception of her reply, how should I ever have kept myself alive, save for the chivalrous aid of the Black Knight in " Ivanhoe." To him, mainly, assisted by Rebecca, and (I am bound to say) by that scoundrel Brian de Bois Guilbert, are my obligations due, that I did not -through the extremities of despair and hope, suffered during that interval—become a drivelling idiot. 66 66 ble, and sometimes even in an open boat upon the Hebridean seas. I often think, if such be the fascination exercised by books upon their readers, how wondrous must be the enchantment wrought upon the writers themselves! What human sorrow can afflict what prosperity dazzle them, while they are describing the fortunes of the offspring of their own imagination? They have only to close their study door, and take their magic pen in hand, and lo! they are at once transported from this weary world of duns and critics and publishers, into whatever region and time they will. Yes, truly, it is for authors themselves, more than for any other order of men whatever, to acknowledge the blessedness of books. From The Saturday Review. LA PLURALITE DES MONDES HABITES.* When her answer did arrive,-in the negative,-what was it which preserved me from the noose, the razor, or the stream, but Mr. THE Controversy concerning the existence Carlyle's "French Revolution"? In the of life in other planetary bodies than our woes of poor Louis Capet, I forgot my own; earth-or, in other words, that of the pluralin the just indignation of his unhappy wife,* ity of inhabited worlds-has slumbered in I ceased to dwell upon the cruel manner in this country since its temporary revival ten which Jemima Anne had led me on; and years ago. By the common consent, not only finally, in the narration of Carrier's " Noya- of those who were qualified by special study des," that false maiden sank from my mem- to pronounce an opinion upon a purely sciory, wholly scuttled," so to speak, in the entific subject, but also of most persons of ortide of rushing Loire. Who, having a grate-dinary practical understanding, the question ful heart, can forget these things, or deny was perceived to be wholly insoluble in fact, the blessedness of books? If it were only as well as sterile in all practical results. The for the hours of weary waiting which they utmost that could be made out on the affirmhave consumed for me at desolate railway ative side was that there were no physical stations, I pay them grateful homage. But conditions known to belong to other bodies for them I should have gone mad with the differently situated in space from our own contemplation of Time Tables, and advertise- globe, actually incompatible with the existments of Thorley's Food for Cattle," and ence of some form or other of life or organi"BEDS sent free by Post," scores and scores zation. It could be proved that even upon of times; but for them, I should have been our planet forms of life exist under varieties worse even than I have been upon many of heat, light, and chemical or other physical a packet's deck; for it is good to keep one's conditions, as extreme as any that need be conmind employed when the physical interior sidered to exist in other members of the solar is menaced with anarchy and general over-group, or on the surface of the sun itself. turn; but for them, the hours would often And though it could not be said that the have dragged very drearily with me, when range of life assignable to human kind, or to flying on the wings of steam-yet far too the other higher types of organization, was slowly-towards home and wife and children. so wide in extent, it seemed arbitrary to deny Nay, under far more serious circumstan- to a principle so infinitely plastic as that of ces, when disappointment has lain heavy on organic life the power of manifesting itmy soul, and once when ruin itself seemed self in types approaching to that of man,overshadowing me and mine, what escape types, it may be, a little lower than the least have I not found from irremediable woes in developed variety of his race, or, it may be, taking the hand of Samuel Johnson (kindly transcending, for aught we know, the highintroduced to that great man by Mr. Bos- est form in which humanity has displayed well), and hearing him discourse with won- itself on earth. The sum of the argument drous wisdom upon all things under heaven, from scientific data was little more than negsometimes at a club of wits and men of let-ative. It attained, at the most, to no more ters, and sometimes at a common tavern ta- than a degree of probability resting upon "Vous etes tous des scelerats!" cried she to the Municipal Guard through her woman's tears. *La Pluralite des Mondes Habites." Par Camille Flammarion. Paris: 1864. analogy, and approving itself to this or that mind as the bias of fancy or prepossession inclined, rather than as strict reasoning and the observation of facts would logically tend. The most mischievous result, however, of the controversy became apparent when-instead of being treated, as it should by rights have been, as a question of strictly scientific investigation-it was brought under the light of metaphysical, moral, and theological speculation. The argument from final causes was invoked by one class of disputants, that from religious dogma or tradition by another. But here, too, as in the former case, it was found that either argument could be turned, in different hands, to support diametrically opposite conclusions. To those who went with the eminent reviver of the dispute, in his " Essay on the Plurality of Worlds," a reference to the divine design clearly evinced the uninhabited state of all other worlds save our own, because man is intended to be the exclusive recipient of the Creator's beneficence. To those who obeyed the scientific teaching of "More Worlds than One," it is manifestly proved that the planets, and even the members of the most remote sidereal systems, must be teeming with rational and spiritual beings, in order to exalt the same Creator's perfections and to render a reason for their existence. A curious dilemma was the result. On the one hand, it was argued that those bodies must be inhabited, because they could only have been created for the sustenance of life; on the other, that they could not be inhabited, because they could only have been created as foils to enhance the dignity of the earth and of man. If one class were right, the universe must be inhabited, because a void universe would be useless and without an end; if the other, then a void universe is necessary for the exaltation of man, and of the divine dispensations toward him. In this state of dead-lock the problem has since been allowed to rest amongst ourselves. It still, however, appears to have retained its charm for the less matter-of-fact and utilitarian class of minds among our neighbors. M. Camille Flammarion-a competent practical astronomer, as is shown by his previous writings upon celestial subjects, no less than by his official position as assistant at the Observatory and the Bureau of Longitudeshas avowed himself a passionate partisan on the side of the plurality of worlds, and may be said to have exhausted the arguments in its behalf. Not content with the physical or strictly scientific treatment of the subject, he pursues it into its bearings upon the entire realm of knowledge or belief. To his fervid imagination it swells, as he proceeds, in proportion and importance, till it becomes at length commensurate with philosophy itself, and appears as the basis for a new and allembracing system of religion. In the original impression of his work he seems but to have shadowed out the faint conception of such a system. But the germ has since grown to gigantic proportions, and the work has been entirely rewritten. The faith of the world seems to him to be dead and buried. The relations of man to the universe, to himself, to God, have been shaken and overthrown. History is dried up, philosophy has no voice, religion expires in enigmas. the past is exhausted, the present is chaotic, the future, save for one ray of light, remains dim, unmeaning, inexplicable. What remains but to open to man new and wider relations, to declare to him his true place in the universe, to connect him with other beings, other worlds than his own, and encourage him with the hope that closer communion with those beings and those spheres may form his blissful and immortal lot? Man has been taught too long to look upon himself as alone in the world of consciousness, to consider his little speck of matter the sole centre of life, intelligence, and will. The ant has conceived his ant-hill to be the only scene of activity in the universe. And this isolation of himself has naturally given birth to an inordinate and ridiculous conceit. Man has plumed himself upon being supreme lord and master of creation, and has absurdly fancied the whole forces of matter and all the host of heaven to be made for his contemplation or his use. It is time for this silly pride to be humbled. And under the chastening hand of astronomical study, rightly directed, mankind will for the future take an humbler but a truer place in the order of animated being. Our humanity will assume a rank, though it be the lowest, among the manifold humanities of space. One law of belief will henceforth exist for all,—the Religion of Science : "La certitude philosophique de la Pluralité des Mondes n'existe pas encore, parce qu'on n'a pas établi cette vérité sur l'examen des faits astronomiques qui la démontrent; et l'on a vu, ces derniers temps encore, des écrivains en renom hausser impunément les épuales en entendant parler des terres du ciel, sans que l'on ait pu leur répondre par des faits, et les clouer au pied de leurs ineptes raisonnements. "Quoique cette question paraisse aux uns d'une haute portée philosophique, mais entourée de mystères impénétrables, quoiqu'elle ne soit pour d'autres qu'une fantaisie de curiosité attenante à la recherche vaine du grand inconnu, nous l'avons toujours regardée comme l'une des questions fondamentales de This la philosophie, et du jour où, pressé par la book in which he maintained that the numconviction profonde qui était en nous antéri- ber of inhabited worlds was one hundred and eurement à toute étude scientifique, nous avons eighty-three,—an idea, says Plutarch, which, voulu l'approfondir, la discuter, et essayer from a mysterious old sage, had spread_for d'en faire une démonstration extérieure, nous centuries as far as the Indian seas. avons vu que loin d'être inaccessible aux re- mystical number was made out by viewing cherches de l'esprit humain, elle brillait de- the universe as a triangle, the sides of which vant lui dans une clarté limpide. Bientôt were formed by sixty worlds, having each même il devint évident pour nous que cette angle further marked by a single world. doctrine était la consécration immédiate de Whether, however, we trace the developla science astronomique; qu'elle était la phi- ment of the idea through all the oscillations losophie de l'univers, que la vie et la vérité of opinion in the classical or mediæval ages, resplendissaient en elle, et que la grandeur in Lucretius or anti-Lucretius, in Nicolas of de la création et la majesté de son Auteur Cusa or in Montaigne, in Galileo, Kepler, n'éclataient nulle part avec autant de lumiere Huyghens, or Fontenelle, it must be obvious que dans cette large interprétation de l'œuvre that the value of their testimony cannot exde la nature. Aussi, reconnaissant en elle ceed that of the considerations on which it un des éléments du progrès intellectuel de rests. In a scientific point of view it is no l'humanité, nous avons appliqué nos soins à more to be quoted than it might be in favor son étude, et nous nous sommes proposé de of the existence of witchcraft or of ghosts. It l'établir sur des arguments solides, contre is to the second or physical portion of M. lesquels les défiances du doute ou les armes de Flammarion's work that we ought to look for la négation ne puissent prévaloir." the real grounds of his conviction. It is in this, however, that we feel more and more The first of the five books into which the the vague and hypothetical nature of the treatise of M. Flammarion is divided consists problem. It is impossible to do more than of an elaborate history of the doctrine in enunciate with somewhat more fulness of dequestion. In fulness and accuracy of learn- tail those physical conditions which Hering he here leaves behind all that has been schel, Sir David Brewster, and others have compiled upon the subject by English writers. laid down, as limiting the possibilities of life In point of logical effect, however, it would elsewhere. On the relations of sense and be vain to attribute much strength to such a other bodily functions to heat and light, or chain of authorities. It is curious as a chap- those of muscular force, stature, and action ter in the history of opinion. It forms a to terrestrial and solar gravity, nothing new tribute to the industry of the compiler, but is here said, or apparently can be said. A it proves nothing more. A catena quite as complete and highly graphic popular descripcopious and authoritative might be as readily tion is indeed given of the solar system, and drawn out on the other side. And in ques- of its constituent orbs,—of the distance, size, tions of pure science great names go for noth-weight, and density of each, together with ing. A single fact of experiment or ob- the calculated ratio of heat and light which servation must be allowed to outweigh the each of the planetary bodies derives from the accumulated opinions and traditions of cen- sun. And there is little need of the author's turies. It is a matter of historic interest, im passionad rhetoric to enhance the testibut nothing more, that the idea of the moon mony borne by these elementary facts of sciand planets being peopled was common to the ence to the vastness, the harmony, or the earliest races of India and Egypt, that it en- majesty of creation. But they leave the real tered into the Nirvana of the Aryan sage, point of the inquiry exactly where it was. into the Chaldean and the Orphic cosmogo- The method of final causes is next appealed nies, into the celestial symbolism of our to. Is it possible to conceive that the beauty, Druid and Celtic forefathers, and into the the splendor, the utility of this infinite syshalf-religious, half-philosophic mythology of tem were designed to be appreciated and enGreece. It was caught from Egypt by joyed but by the scanty inhabitants of one Thales; it was handed on by the whole Ionic miserable little corner of the whole? Franschool through Anaximander and Anaxim- cœur, by way of giving us an original idea till it reappeared in Origen and Des- of the earth's mass, calculates that to set in cartes. It formed one of the charges of motion such a globe at the surface of our heresy that nearly proved fatal to Anaxag-planet would require ten thousand million oras, as it subsequently added to the doom teams of ten thousand million horses each. of the unhappy Giordano Bruno. Pythagoras and Democritus, Timæus of Locris and Archytas of Tarentum, Xenophanes and the Eleatic school, were in harmony upon this one point. Petronius of Himera wrote a enes, To start the sun, declares M. Flammarion, not less than 3,550,000 milliards of such teams would suffice. And is the giant to exist for the service and accommodation of the mite? It is when he passes from the physical or Another 66 In an la physiological to the moral and the theologi- listen to M. Flammarion lecturing us. cal point of view that the writer is able to atmosphere no longer composed of oxygen soar to the height of his argument. His and azote, what ills of climate may not be method seems to be mainly that of assuming spared those fortunate denizens? The whole the universal diffusion of life throughout pulmonary apparatus is doubtless modified, creation, and of leaving to the gainsayer the and with it the whole system of organic func task of establishing the right of the earth to tions. Instead of the gross and clumsy plan a monopoly. Why should ours be the privi- of keeping up the bodily growth and warmth leged world? So far from being the best in a by food, liquid and solid,—the degrading exmoral sense, it is absolutely bad, and would pedient of borrowing for that end, the debris be known for such but for the inveterate op- of other beings, and, worst of all, that of timism of its rulers, especially its philoso- killing and devouring those endowed with phers and priests. The fallacy with which life, there may be a system of " nourishing M. Flammarion has no patience is, that what- atmospheres," composed of elements nutriever exists here is intrinsically good and right. tious in themselves, and capable of assimilaIn face of the actual state of the world every tion by organs of corresponding ethereal texcandid man must be a pessimist. The wolf ture. In the general repeal of laws which is forever preying upon the innocent sheep. belong to man's inferior state, that of Brutal force weighs down virtuous weakness, bor " may come in for the earliest abolition, Dark passions dominate here; base intrigues and with it go all those vulgar cares, appetites, bear rule there. As in the days of Brutus, and ambitions to which so much of the misgood men may be counted on the fingers. Be-ery and ennui of terrestrial life are due. Vice fore the Supreme, indeed, all is optimism. Viewed as a whole, his works are all good, all holy, all beneficent. But where is this his rule carried out in fact? Not on the earth, we have seen. There must then be further and superior spheres of life and action; and the plurality of worlds is a necessary truth in a philosophical sense, and demanded by justice in a moral sense. Many writers have gone into the question of the probable stature, strength, and configuration of our fellow-beings in other spheres. Christian Wolff long ago fixed the height of the inhabitants of Jupiter at forty feet eight inches. The Fouriérists have more recently imagined a kind of celestial hierarchy in which the successive groups rise one above another, in analogy with those of the lower universe, into what M. Renaud has termed binivers, trinivers, quatrinivers, etc. The planets themselves have souls, and die out, as ours will do, to give place to newer forms of planetary life. Swedenborg, everybody knows, grew so familiar with the inhabitants of the several planets in which he was in the habit of spending his leisure moments of spiritual ecstasy, that he has left us little to find out touching the moral and other characteristics of our brethren in those abodes. The feelings with which we, in turn, inspire those remote relations of ours-the lively warmth of Venus, the dignified calm of Jupiter, the sardonic coldness of Saturn-are not less matters of fact and veracity. Science, thus interpreted, points to a place for our souls among those radiant spheres. Transported among new conditions of existence, they may contract or put forth powers akin to those of the happier beings whose lot has been already cast there. And, as to what that lot may be, it makes the mouth water to will never have arisen. The origin of evil But we are dazzled and lose breath as we |