the luminous surface suffered to act with full intensity upon the central globe — unless that globe be composed of matter very different from any thing that we are acquainted with — it would long ere this have transmuted it into gas. Necessarily, therefore, there are mitigating media interposed between the light and heat-giving sufface and the solid globe; the only question, therefore, as to its being a habitable world, is the degree of that mitigation. We say nothing of the oft-repeated observation, that God is able to adapt His creatures to the place of their abode, even if that should be in the fire. Such assumptions are unphilosophical, and find no support in the whole field of analogy. We shall only say further on this branch of our subject, that there is no violence done to the soundest principles of philosophy in supposing the sun to be an inhabited world, and that all suns are so. And as there is no night there,' no change of seasons, no outside chronometers, and nothing beyond its own grand and independent economy to affect it, it may be an abode of immortal beings, one of the many mansions' in our FATHER's house.

Of the relative ages of the sun and the earth we can know nothing. We have but one clue to guide us in this inquiry, and that seems to favor the impression, that in point of progress, the centre of the system is in advance of the extremities. The earth being taken as the standard of density for a finished or habitable world, Mercury, Venus and Mars are also finished. Of the first we know little, except its size and density; its proximity to the sun, causing it to be almost lost to us in the splendor of his rays. Venus has an atmosphere like that of earth; but to screen it from too excessive heat and light, it is nearly at all times covered with a canopy of clouds. We can hardly doubt, therefore, that it is a habitable and inhabited world, and probably was so ages before this earth of ours.

Of our own planet we need not speak.

An eminent geologist, speaking of the period of the 'Old Red Sand-stone,' remarked, that at that time our planet would have presented a reddish hue to an observer on another planet. If he was right, then Mars may reasonably be supposed to be in that period of its progress. His waters have been gathered together and his dry land has appeared, and he presents the aspect which it is said the earth would have presented in the period referred to.

Of the Asteroids, the supposed fragments of an exploded planet, the orbit of which lay between those of Mars and Jupiter, we shall say nothing, for we know nothing; but there is little to warrant us in supposing that they are ever destined to become habitable worlds.

Jupiter, with his brilliant white light, is next in order. Its light is exactly that which would be reflected from watery vapor; and its density, as computed by its apparent diameter, being about that of water, would teach us that its vapory surroundings exceed in volume, in the proportion of at least four to one, the solid globe. We may hence assign to it the place in the scale of progress which the earth occupied in Moses' first day, when the spirit of GoD moved upon the face of the waters. There is a movement. We see it; for sometimes his disk presents the appearance of being traversed from east to west by broad bands, while at other times these are broken up, and the face of

A great

the planet looks like an ocean agitated with tumultuous waves. movement of some kind is going on; and it is a thought sublimely startling that, with the aid of a telescope, we may see in Jupiter the same mighty operations of creative energy which,, as we believe, the prophet saw in vision as occurring countless ages ago upon this planet. Millions of years may yet be required to fit it for habitation; but hard as it is for us to conceive it, we must not forget that duration is as ample as space, both being alike illimitable. Gauged, therefore, by the standard of eternity; in a little while Jupiter's waters will be gathered together and his dry land will appear. Life and order and beauty will succeed, as they did here, to darkness, confusion and void.

- Saturn, according to the same rule, is still lower in the scale of progress; for, estimated by his visible disk, his density is only about equal to that of cork. His vapory particles must therefore be immensely diffused, which indicates the existence of excessive heat in the central body. His concentric rings are probably composed of vapor combined with other aëriform matter, which, in the present condition of the planet, find their place of rest or balance in that form and position. His pale white light is just such as would be reflected from a mass of the most attenuated vapor.

Of the two still more remote planets, it is not necessary to speak in this connection.

As each department of creation is more or less a type of all other departments, we may strengthen this argument analogically. In a forest we find the individuals which compose it in every stage of progress, from the germ to the full-grown tree. In the animal kingdom we find the same thing; and no small part of the interest and beauty of earth arises from this cause. Surely, then, we may rationally indulge the pleasing thought that in those wider and grander fields of creation the same great law of production and progress is in force. This thought, blended with the assured hope of our own immortality, is very inspiring. Like ourselves, some of these countless worlds which we see arranged around us in the dim distance, we have reason to believe, are to a good degree perfected, while others are yet in a condition of darkness and confusion, as we are in this life; yet the work of redemption is going on under the mighty power of HIM 'who commands the light to shine out of darkness,' who calls order out of confusion, life out of death. In the ages to come we shall see new glory and beauty springing forth, as a delighted child beholds the expanding glories of a flower-garden.

If what we have here said of our own system be sound argument, the same may be applied to all other systems, and systems of systems. In those stupendous fields of light and life and power there is no retrogradation, no decay, no death. Annihilation is an idea as unphilosophical as it is abhorrent. Parts dissolve, organisms decompose and return to their original elements; but these changes are only processes in the great laboratory of nature, and form an essential part of the progress of which we are speaking. The tendency of all things is onward and upward, to higher and higher degrees of glory, beauty and utility

FROM better thence again to better still,

In infinite progression.'

LOVE-LONGING.

STEAL to my room when day is dim, When crimson clouds in purple swim, When the white sails upon the bay, In rising vapors melt away; When VENUS twinkles faint and far, And the light-tower wakes to woo the star, And they meet reflected in the tide, The earthly lover and heavenly bride. If she can stoop from her high degree To bathe with her love in the silent sea, Shall I, a maiden of mortal mould, To my nearest, dearest, be dull and cold? Then come to my room, and we will stand Before the mirror, and hand in hand, With twinkling kisses and glances bright, Repeat the star-love we saw by night, And thou my beacon-tower shalt be, · And I thy VENUS — my glass our sea!

SUN SHINE

IN

THOUGHT:

OR CHAPTERS ON THE CHEERFUL AND JOYOUS IN LITERATURE AND ART.

BY CHARLES GODFREY LELAND.

CHAPTER THIRD.

who has ever

Ir may seem strange when I say that I know of no writer preached the gospel of Joyousness in all its health and purity. But the world has never been as yet fit to receive it. Even now, years must pass ere it can be unfolded. I who write, you who read, live in an age when we only, from time to time, in calmer hours, hear from afar a few merry notes of the deep ringing, fairy horn which glads the soul. Only now and then can a gleam of the sun-light pierce the dark clouds; and where it falls it must rest as yet, like such gleams in Ruysdael's pictures, on withered grass or damp ruin. The world is still in its earliest March spring. Winds blow freshly but wildly and chill; the nights are long and dreary, and during those nights the old grandmother crone, cowering in the sheltering antique chimney-corner, still repeats to believing ears horrible legends, dreadful ballads. The elder or wiser ones, indeed, only half believe them many laugh at them. But all, and most of all the many children, still shiver at their grotesque, moving poetry, and when they make and sing new songs for themselves, the old witch-pain still quavers through them, and we know where they learned their earliest lays.

Was Aristophanes joyous? He had, indeed, dipped from the water of life, eaten of the tree of knowledge, and was a genius. He was free of the world. In his lightest arabesques and most trivial whirls I trace the eternal line of life; in his most capricious trills sounds the deep eternal monotone of death. Human follies, roaring laughter, the din of the market, and the foul, stupid slander of the mob; animals as men, and men as animals; gods, clouds, wasps, beautiful eyes, birds in stupendous cities far away in the distant Blue, worlds and heavens go whirling together in terrible chaos under his hands, and out of that chaos the great laughing mind which has plumbed the very abyss of agony shapes out a harmonious creation, too great save for a few kindred minds in each generation to grasp. But was he joyous? Is the great satirist who overwhelms good and bad together, wielding the deadly mace, like Thor leveling the tremendous enemies of Giant-Home is he truly, genially joyous ? If joy, it is the mad joy of the Berserker, who, laughing, yet with cool, wary method in all his madness, wades on exulting through blood. Aristophanes still had the sorrows which grieve the strong humorist of every age; the sorrow of seeing right and human happiness trodden down and wounded by tyranny and folly and ignorance. At the best, he, like Cervantes, could only make the best of life. But who could be joyous, dear friend and reader, when pain and sorrow were the great foundation-stones on which that gay Venus temple of Greek beauty was built? For every free citizen who wandered

through groves of the Academe, holding high converse with Plato, criticising statues, and revelling in the most conscious appreciation of the Beautiful in every form, there were a dozen slaves, and HEAVEN knows how many millions of outside barbarians, whose life was as utterly un-joyous as life could be.

Could one only forget the blood running like water, the racks and great estates, and first families with murderous feuds, and poisonings of men who were suspected of disrespecting the gods, and were rumored' to have familiar spirits, we should find that Greek era merry enough. Joyous, too, after its wild fashion, was it in the Shemitic lands, always excepting the grimly-bedevilled corner of those unfortunate Hebrews who, continually see-sawing between Baal Peor and Jehovah, knew no rest until they found a settled faith, when captive in Assyria-found it, I suppose, by sheer force of obstinate antagonism to their captors. Jolly old Babylon and naked Nineveh; the entire Phoenician belt of cities, like Lesbos and Corinth after them, seem to have cherished, whetted to the keenest edge, such an uncontrollable appetite for beauty in every sense; yes, to have been stung by such provoking gad-flies of desire for every pleasure, and to have salved the sting so copiously, that one is really often tempted to sincerely wonder if they did not enjoy life to the very last conceivable degree? For then in those days were bread and summer fruits for the young men to eat and they crammed themselves; and wine for such as be faint in the wilderness - and they swilled it; and Moabitish girls of fair countenance, and singing eunuchs and women, and pipe and dulcimer and psaltery and wild orgies of Adon-Thammuz, and murmurs of ultimate ecstasy in every high place and under every green tree:

'But under it all there ran a low, perpetual wail as of souls in pain.'

They paid dearly for their whistle-paid for it bitterly with superstition and tyranny and wars and blood, and unknown horrors and terrors. There are joyous pictures, too, in Etrurian tombs; life was all one solemn, darklytoned dancing-girled banquet with them, and with the Egyptians. But the human sacrifice was not far off, and just without, naked, grisly slaves, chained, beast-like, ground away their lives in mills, starving on handfuls of raw corn, ever lashed and tortured. Ah! and our earnest, gentlemanly Roman friends! How one walks as in a fairy garden through the pleasant groves after the Golden Ass of Apuleius! But the warm embraces of the white-limbed maid Fotis, and all the revelry and drollery, shrivel away into empty Elvish sheen for me when I recal those poor horrid wretches, ghastly forms between death and life, which peer and gibber out from their cattle-work in mines. The time had not come.

Glorious Father Rabelais of later days; great sage of Humor; inexhaustible fountain of genius, wert thou JOYOUS? For thyself, no one more so. The time has been when I lived in thee and said ne plus ultra. He has not yet lived who has exhausted thee. The exuberant objective buffoonery of Southern lands, the infinite mystical humor of the North which embraces every feeling, Pulchinello and the subtle Loki who darted on wings of fire through every cranny of earth; all of these blended in thee. In Rabelais, for the time, I forget every sorrow.

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