"You observe most carefully through the telescope stars which no longer exist. Many of the stars visible to the naked eye are no longer in existence. Many of the nebulæ whose substance you analyze through the spectroscope have become suns. Many of your most beautiful red stars are extinct and dead; you would not detect them if you should go to them.
"The light shed from all the suns which people immensity, the light reflected into space from all the worlds irradiated by these suns, carries away through the boundless skies photographs of all the centuries every day, every second. Looking at a star, you see it as it was at the time the impression that you receive left it,—just as when you hear a clock strike, you receive the sound after it has left it, and as long after as you are far from it.
"The result is, that the history of all these worlds actually travels through space, never entirely disappearing; that all past events are present and indestructible in the bosom of the infinite.
"The universe will endure forever. The Earth will come to an end, and some day will be nothing but a tomb. But there will be new suns and new earths, new springs and new smiles, and life will always bloom afresh in the limitless and endless universe.
"I wanted to show you," said she, after a pause, "how eternal time is! You have felt the infinity of space, you have understood the grandeur of the universe. Now your celestial journey is over. We must go back to the earth and your own home again.
"For yourself," she added, "know that study is the one source of any intellectual value; be neither rich nor poor; keep yourself from all ambition as well as from all servitude; be independent,—independence is the rarest gift and the first condition of happiness."
Urania was still speaking in her gentle voice; but my brain was so confused by the commotion aroused in it by so many extraordinary scenes that I was seized by a fit of trembling. A shiver ran over me from head to foot, which was probably the cause of my abrupt awakening in a state of great agitation. Alas! the delightful celestial journey had ended.
I looked about for Urania, but could not find her. A bright moonbeam shining through my bedroom window lightly touched the edge of a curtain and seemed vaguely to outline the aerial form of my heavenly guide; but it was only a moonbeam.
*****