This, indeed, is quite curious, but ought not to surprise one who reflects that the cosmography of Columbus was not much advanced from the time of Dante. In this very canto the poet shows that he knew about the variation of the ecliptic and the retrogression of the equinoxes. From his age to that of the great navigator, science had hardly taken a forward step. In fact, before 1300, Dante was acquainted not only with the sphericity of the earth, but with the first law of gravitation—the tendency of things to their centre. Few consider how very slow was the growth of science from that which Dante had learned in Florence, and Columbus had studied in Pavia and Sienna, up to the time of Copernicus, at whom, so late as 1625, Lord Bacon had the hardihood to give this fling: "Who would not smile at the astronomers—I mean, not those carmen which drive the earth about, but the few ancient astronomers, which feign the moon to be the swiftest of the planets in motion, etc.?"
The pages of this magazine will not permit us to prolong an inquiry that may hereafter, and which ought to, be made as to the Ptolemean astronomy of the schools in the age of Dante. The one scholar in this country most capable of such investigation is too busy—we mean Professor Peirce, of the U. S. Coast Survey.—Translator.
GRAPES AND THORNS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE HOUSE OF YORKE."
CHAPTER VII.
MOTHER CHEVREUSE AGAIN.
If one would take the trouble to search into the subject, it would, perhaps, be acknowledged that the apparently unreasonable emotion that women display on occasions when men find themselves unmoved is not, after all, entirely ridiculous. It may be annoying, it may partake of the hysterical; but, if genuine, it is the sign of a more subtile, though often vague, perception.
A woman whom the Creator has endowed so nobly with intellect as to make it a source of painful regret that the infinitely higher supernatural gifts are lacking in her has written words which may be quoted in this connection: "That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotions of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."
Had George Eliot been gifted with faith as with reason, she could not have written that paragraph without recollecting that the saint on earth is an exception to her rule; that the soul illumined by the Holy Spirit has so keen a perception, not of natural things as such, but of natural things in their relations to God; that but for the divine strength and peace which accompany the holy presence, it could not endure that vision of eternal results hanging on apparently trivial causes. To such a soul there are but two paths, and every smallest step is in the road to heaven or the road to hell.