'Why I a woman, or you a man, dear Lady Constantine?' 'I cannot explain. No; you must keep your fame and your science all to yourself, and I must keep my--troubles.' Swithin, to divert her from melancholy--not knowing that in the expression of her melancholy thus and now she found much
pleasure,--changed the subject by asking if they should take some
observations.
'Yes; the scenery is well hung to-night,' she said looking out upon the
heavens.
Then they proceeded to scan the sky, roving from planet to star, from
single stars to double stars, from double to coloured stars, in the
cursory manner of the merely curious. They plunged down to that at other
times invisible multitude in the back rows of the celestial theatre:
remote layers of constellations whose shapes were new and singular;
pretty twinklers which for infinite ages had spent their beams without
calling forth from a single earthly poet a single line, or being able to
bestow a ray of comfort on a single benighted traveller.
'And to think,' said Lady Constantine, 'that the whole race of shepherds,
since the beginning of the world,--even those immortal shepherds who
watched near Bethlehem,--should have gone into their graves without
knowing that for one star that lighted them in their labours, there were
a hundred as good behind trying to do so! . . . I have a feeling for
this instrument not unlike the awe I should feel in the presence of a
great magician in whom I really believed. Its powers are so enormous,
and weird, and fantastical, that I should have a personal fear in being
with it alone. Music drew an angel down, said the poet: but what is that
to drawing down worlds!' 'I often experience a kind of fear of the sky after sitting in the
observing-chair a long time,' he answered. 'And when I walk home
afterwards I also fear it, for what I know is there, but cannot see, as
one naturally fears the presence of a vast formless something that only
reveals a very little of itself. That's partly what I meant by saying
that magnitude, which up to a certain point has grandeur, has beyond it
ghastliness.' Thus the interest of their sidereal observations led them on, till the
knowledge that scarce any other human vision was travelling within a
hundred million miles of their own gave them such a sense of the
isolation of that faculty as almost to be a sense of isolation in respect
of their whole personality, causing a shudder at its absoluteness. At
night, when human discords and harmonies are hushed, in a general sense,
for the greater part of twelve hours, there is nothing to moderate the
blow with which the infinitely great, the stellar universe, strikes down
upon the infinitely little, the mind of the beholder; and this was the
case now. Having got closer to immensity than their fellow-creatures,
they saw at once its beauty and its frightfulness. They more and more
felt the contrast between their own tiny magnitudes and those among which
they had recklessly plunged, till they were oppressed with the presence
of a vastness they could not cope with even as an idea, and which hung
about them like a nightmare.