"It is all over, dear fellow," he whispered, in a hoarse voice; "but tell her I loved her. You will forgive me, I know, for I have never let her see it. I knew she was yours; but why not tell me, Jim ?" "Mine! God help you, Herbert, how could you be so deceived? I love her, as you may guess, but Nellie has no feeling for me but regard, friendship, confidence. I saw it at once, and have never breathed a word of my feelings to her."

A strange, wild light gleamed in Herbert's eyes, but only for a moment; "tell her, then, I loved her, darling Nellie."

The revulsion of feeling was too strong, and he fainted again.

Elton had sent for the best surgeon in Rome, and he arrived, fortunately, almost immediately. After three or four hours of great peril, the effusion of blood was stanched, and the case pronounced not entirely hopeless. Constant watching was enjoined. Weakness and fever were both to be guarded against, but if all went well, the enforced care and repose might, so said the great authority, restore his health, which evidently had been much shaken.

"Dear Nell," wrote Elton, "I can not leave Herbert; his exertions to-day have ended in a broken blood-vessel. Ďo not be frightened; great care is required, but the worst of the danger is over. He was in great peril for some hours. I shall not leave him for a day or two. Take care of yourself. I will send you another bulletin to-morrow. How he loves you, Nell! He had got some preposterous nonsense into his head before; but when he thought it was all over with him, he held me to him and whispered, with what we all thought was his last breath: Tell her how I loved her. Darling Nellie.' Will this bring back the color to your cheek, and the light to your eyes? It was all a mistake before!"

The leader of a forlorn hope, the martyr in his shirt of fire, have rarely overcome self more nobly and entirely than did James Elton when he wrote the last few sentences of his letter. He dispatched it at ten o'clock, and composed himself for the night, leaving the door between the

Herbert continued asleep; the exhaustion was so great, and nature was also asserting her right to replace the rest he had so mercilessly robbed himself of for so many months and years. Elton was dozing, too, be it said; in fact, good, patient Elton was tired out, but it was a very slight doze, for he started to his feet on hearing a sound of a passer-by in the street. All was quiet again. He had heard about ten minutes after the movement in the street, a slight rustle in the curtains at the opposite side of the bed, but he fancied it was the window, or some outer door beyond, which had admitted a little air, and he did not move.

About dawn Herbert awoke. He moaned a little, and with the vague unrest of weakness, stretched out his arms. A hand held a cup with a cordial to his lips.

"Thank you, Jim," he said, and pressed the hand. It was so soft and small that he involuntarily opened his eyes.

A female figure was bending over him; there was tender compassion, but there was something more solemn and more exalted in those divine eyes.

"Notre Dame de bon Secours! Oh! if I dream may I never wake again." His senses seemed swaying to and fro on the verge of delirium.

It was a low but mortal voice which replied:

"Was all the debt to be mine, John? were you to save my life twice, and this time at the risk of your own, and was I never to prove that I was grateful to you that I loved you?"

The last words were added in compliance with the wild and questioning ardor in the hollow eyes which were fixed on her, and then she bent low over his hand, and Herbert felt Nellie's tears fall fast on it.

Six months afterward John Herbert was painting at his great picture. He was paler, thinner, but the whole man looked vivified into health and happiness. He and Nellie had been married a month. It was November, and they had returned to Rome.

"How are you getting on, Herbert ?" said Elton.

"Famously; but when did you arrive ?" "Only last night. I am en route to the East."

"Nonsense," said a voice from the

the fact that the battery was the instrument as well worthy of study as the piece of iron which attracted the various metals placed near it; for the more we can trace effects to other effects, the

nearer we must be to causes.

"The sun is spherical, and rotates upon an axis, and thus bears a strong likeness to the planets. A question which naturally arises here is, whether the sun is entirely independent as regards its source of heat-giving power; or is it connected by some subtle means with another orb? Is the sun, in fact, a planet to some other sun? and is our earth, and are the other planets, but the satellites of our sun? "We have seen that there is good reason to believe that the spots on the sun produce some effects of a magnetic and electric character upon our earth; and we are by this fact prepared to believe that there are agencies at work in the universe of a subtlety and power beyond our present knowledge or experience. Thus the sun may be influenced in a measure by some distant twinkling star, which is yet a mysterious link between our sun and other portions of creation. "If there were an inhabitant on one of Nep. tune's satellites, he might not think much of the influence of our sun upon his primary planet, and he might be sadly puzzled to account for the variations in light and darkness which

occurred.

"Some observers have supposed that the two hemispheres of the sun do not give an equal quantity of light. If this belief be a truth, it would give some probability to the supposition that the sun is not entirely independent; for we might conclude that there was a summer and a winter on the sun, and thus that one

hemisphere (the brightest) was then enjoying summer, and the other possessing winter."

We have often felt that, profound and awful indeed as is the study of Astronomy in its more scientific relations, it is disgraceful that so little is known of the friendly wanderers who return to visit us night by night, and season by season. To be able to enjoy the fruit of the science requires, as our writer truly says, little more than eyes, a telescope, and a few minutes' attention. As certainly as a man may enjoy a long walk without a knowledge either of anatomy or of the laws of mechanics, so a man may enjoy the constant appearance of the mysterious marvels of the skies. And not only is it somewhat shameful to us that we do not know the forms, it is not less so that we do not know something of the causes of varying astronomical places and appearances.

It is, of course, very probable that no man would be long allowed to pursue a discourse on a topic like the present without being questioned as to the utility of such studies. Why, it will no doubt be

said, why with wandering wing pursue your flight from world to world? Why not fix the eye on the earth and on the objects of attention which absorb the attention here? Why attempt at all a speculation beyond the boundaries of the earth? In an age like this, what purpose do you intend to subserve by observing those bodies so dimly seen, removed so far from us in space, and so insignificant in their relation to our human being?

And in reply to this question it might be instantly replied that all things are not to be regarded so. USE! What is the use of a flower? and yet a poor man will frequently lay out a penny upon one. What is the use of a glorious painting-a Murillo, a Claude, a Turner, or a Wilkie? and yet we hang them in our best rooms, and in the most chosen places of our land. What is the use of a rainbow? and yet we greet it-of a glorious sunset? and yet we stay to look at it—of a bird's song? and yet we halt to listen to it, even in the depths of a wood in a dark night. We must not restrict all our feelings and thoughts merely to the marketable commodity of utilitarianism.

And yet we may say the subject is useful. It is impossible to lift up the eye to magnificent objects without elevation of the soul.

All that tends to exalt the huthe chords of deep feeling is useful; all man thought is useful; all that touches that stirs the highest impulses, or awakens most momentous questionings, is useful; all that quickens the human heart to its best destiny, or colors it with the most georgeous lights and shades, or leads it in wonderful and varied wanderings through the aisles of the universal temple, whether those aisles be illuminated by the flashing of planets over the dark arch of the intermediate spaces or through the veins and tubes of the leaf or the flower, all must be useful.

Now, in connection with what we may entitle Transcendental Astronomy, there are some thoughts which all persons, certainly all persons not merely educated, but of any degree of sensibility or feeling, must have experienced. As for instance, first, the profound and unvarying calm of the heavenly bodies shining constantly the same over the mutations and tumults of the earth. To most observers their places never seem to change. We know nothing so affecting (and we have felt it so) as to be stricken

ever.

by a great grief, a great bereavement, a great unbelief, and to go out beneath the night, and look up at those calm, bright, awful solitudes; always the same, standing in the village church-yard, or in the cemetery of some crowded metropolitan city, threading your way among the mountain lonelinesses or forest silences, or in the stillness of your own garden. How deep their hush! how profound their calm! Who has not been affected by the thought that while all is evanescence and change here, there exists there no apparent change, except the to us almost imperceptible motion? They shine as if for The Chaldean hailed the same "Bootes leading his hunting-dogs through the leash of sidereal fire." Those stars gleamed on the armor of the Roman legions, and lit up the Covenanters' glen; streamed into the dungeon of the martyr; shone on the battle-field after the fight, and gave a more purple horror to the red gore on the ocean after the tempest; on the Mayflower with its exiled band to the pine forests of Plymouth Sound; and over the traveler Drake on the Thames, returning from his world voyage. Or again, second, the simple mind will be no less struck by their coldness than their calm. They never shine with the light of sympathy; they minister mostly to the wailings of despair, like the sad faces of dead friends who look mournfully on us through the rent clouds of a melancholy dreamland. There are few who can not utter the exclamation attributed to Carlyle, although we understand he has repudiated it: "Eh! it's a sad sight." Should we not pity the man who in his sorrows could only look up to the infinite and awful stars; their cold beauty repels all love and scares away all consolation; drops a cold vail over all sympathy. You may harken, but unless you have had a message from beyond the stars, "there is no voice nor any to answer."

And yet a third feeling which penetrates us as look up is infinity-there is no end, there is no bound, there is no numbering those hosts whatever they are-whatever their character or their destiny, they are numberless. We do not need the aid of geometry or arithmetic-they tend indeed rather to confuse the simple mind; the spirit must be overwhelmed with the magnificence of the scenery, lost in the immeasurable and illimitable length of spaces and worlds. It is this which in

every age has overpowered man. "When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers: the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man?" Begin to reflect, and you must be lost; it is only splendid ignorance and learned insensibility that needs at all to be spurred or goaded through the universe by the sound of unmeaning numbers; there they are beyond all counting-blazing fires, eternal torches shining over the dark and pale-like cope; they fret the infinite arch; they brighten, dazzle, and disappear! And there we see that long stream of splendid light tradition has called the milky- way.

How high! how vast all spread out! Doubtless, these are letters written by the finger of God, that man may read in their glory his infinity.

These are, then, thoughts familiar to every mind; all who have ever at any time cast an intelligent eye to the heavenly bodies, will have received these intimations of the magnificence of nature, and the meanness of man. But many have not been at all satisfied with this initial view; they have determined with more or less modesty to sound the celestial spaces-to stretch an ambitious wing, and wander unrestrained through this infinity of worlds. Hence has originated a question, now for upwards of a century frequently mooted at intervals-Whether or not the planets are inhabited worlds? A question which as yet science is certainly wholly unprepared to answer, and probably ever will be, but which has been lately made to assume a greater interest in a literary aspect, from the publication of the Essay on the Plurality of Worlds, by Dr. Whewell, and the rejoinder by Sir David Brewster. We have perused both, and many of the reviews of both, with great interest. We sat down to the perusal, with an instinctive faith strong within us, of the inhabitability of the starry worlds; and on the whole, no word has at all shaken our belief, or given a greater certainty or probability to it. But we have been deeply interested in the matter, for several reasons; among others, we have been amused in noticing, how upon a point of opinion, where so little evidence on either side can possibly be adduced, and none of a final and absolute character, the spirit of dogmatism and assumption has been called into play. Certainly no language can be more calm and dignified than that employed by Dr.