[1. Popular Science Monthly," June, 1882, p. 193.
2. Ibid., p. 193.
3. "Chambers's Encyclopaedia," vol. iii, p. 655.]
{p. 430}
And Milton speaks from the same universal inspiration when he tells us:
"A comet burned,
That fires the length of Ophiucus huge
In th' arctic sky, and from its horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war."
And in the Shakespeare plays[1] we read:
"Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky;
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars."
Man, by an inherited instinct, regards the comet as a great terror and a great foe; and the heart of humanity sits uneasily when one blazes in the sky. Even to the scholar and the scientist they are a puzzle and a fear; they are erratic, unusual, anarchical, monstrous--something let loose, like a tiger of the heavens, athwart an orderly, peaceful, and harmonious world. They may be impalpable and harmless attenuations of gas, or they way be loaded with death and ruin; but in any event man can not contemplate them without terror.
[1. 1 Henry VI, 1, 1.]