II.
A school-friend who was keenly interested in astronomy and had directed my nightly contemplations of the heavens, drew me, just about this time, a very good map of the stars, by the help of which I found those stars I knew and extended my knowledge further.
The same school-friend sometimes took me to the Observatory, to see old Professor d'Arrest--a refined and sapient man--and there, for the first time, I saw the stellar heavens through a telescope. I had learnt astronomy at school, but had lacked talent to attain any real insight into the subject. Now the constellations and certain of the stars began to creep into my affections; they became the nightly witnesses of my joys and sorrows, all through my life; the sight of them sometimes comforted me when I felt lonely and forsaken in a foreign land. The Lyre, the Swan, the Eagle, the Crown and Boötes, Auriga, the Hyades and the Pleiades, and among the Winter constellations, Orion; all these twinkling groups, that human eyes have sought for thousands of years, became distant friends of mine, too. And the thoughts which the sight of the countless globes involuntarily and inevitably evokes, were born in me, too,--thoughts of the littleness of the earth in our Solar System, and of our Solar System in the Universe, of immeasurable distances--so great that the stars whose rays, with the rapidity of light's travelling, are striking against our eyes now, may have gone out in our childhood; of immeasurable periods of time, in which a human life, or even the lifetime of a whole people, disappears like a drop in the ocean. And whereas at school I had only studied astronomy as a subject, from its mathematical aspect, I now learnt the results of spectroscopic analysis, which showed me how the human genius of Bunsen and Kirchhoff had annihilated the distance between the Earth and the Sun; and at the same time I perceived the inherent improbability of the culture of our Earth ever being transmitted to other worlds, even as the Earth had never yet received communications from the civilisation of any of the stars.
This circumstance, combined with the certainty of the gradual cooling and eventual death of the Earth, gave me a conclusive impression of the finality of all earthly existence and of the merely temporary character of all progress.
Feeling that all religions built up on a belief in a God were collapsing, Europe had long inclined towards the religion of Progress as the last tenable. Now I perceived as I raised my eyes to the starry expanse and rejoiced in my favourite stars, Sirius in the Great Dog, and Vega in the Lyre or Altair in the Eagle, that it, too, was tottering, this last religion of all.