sister. The stars of Heaven and Earth! Look on these, and see life's shifting scenes; three words express them: budded, blossomed,- -blasted! and these three are all. Gaze up to those, and in their quenchless light, still shining on through clear and cloud the same, read of immortality. These are the stars of life's brief summer day; those are the stars that shed still brighter rays, amid the cold, clear winter's night of death. Turn to these; their faded forms remind you, you must die; then look on those; they tell you, you will live! "Heaven bless our stars!" is often uttered as an idle word, but let me say, will all their lessons now newly graven on my heart, Heaven bless our stars! You have sometimes continued gazing at them, till the dews of the listening night fell free and fast; till you felt how diminutive was the little craft you sailed upon, when the great unnumbered fleet of worlds hung out their signal lights; till the tumult of passion was all hushed, and the thoughts of your heart, like the tides of the sea, flowed up towards Heaven and God. Then the stars whispered humility's lesson in your ear. Then there are stars of the morning too. See that bright sentinel-star, that yet far from its setting, has outwatched the night; like a ship at sea, whose unextinguished watch-fire still faintly gleams across the deep, through the morning's pearl and gold, that finds it out of port. See how its feeble ray struggles with the sunbeams; one can almost fancy it receding into the liquid depths of heaven, a fugitive from day. Now the strained eye can scarce discern its pale and fading form; brighter now-now dim-a point; 'tis lost-melted, melted into light. What a beautiful language does it speak from its high > 2 home, to a struggling hope; what a rebuke to the doubting! Many a spirit bright and heavenly as that star, waiting not to set, has "gone out" in the midst of a career as high and glorious as its own; gone out, amid the wonder and grief and doubt and murmurings of men. "A fate so dark, so saddening!' they say. Dark? Saddening? In the teachings of that star, how beautiful, how sublime, when the pure, parting spirit, in the language of White, 1 "Sets as sets the morning star, which goes Not down behind the darken'd west, nor hides, But melts away into the light of heaven." There is the Polar Star, "Whose faithful beams conduct the wand'ring ship, Who ever saw it shining from out its northern home, "With the faint tremblings of a distant light," and his thought did not hover over the mariner on the yeasty deep? When the storm howls through the shattered rigging, and shreds the half-reefed sails; when the masts creak and bend beneath its power, and the hoarse call of the speakingtrumpet, "all hands on deck!" is faintly heard amid the crash of spars and the roar of waters; when the reckoning is lost, and the compass dashed in pieces, then the poor sailor looks aloft, and there, above the gloom of storm and night, the curtaining clouds half-drawn, shines the Pole-star, the hope-light of his soul, beaming down, bright, beautiful, fair as ever! Is there no language in the Polar Star, reader? Life is a - troublous sea, and all men, mariners; when earthly guides. and hopes are almost gone together, that star whispers, "look aloft! look aloft!" While gazing at those bright, untarnished links of time, one feels a kind of companionship with the men of other and far distant days, and the long ages dwindle down to years. Why, just over your head in a clear January evening shines Orion; the same Orion that Chaldean shepherds saw; the same “dire Orion," that roused the sea in Virgil's time, when "All charg'd with tempest rose the baleful star;" the same Orion to which the inspired prophet alluded, when gazing at the stars as we do now, he uttered the sublime injunction, "Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into morning." Yes, the seven stars are there, and "Arcturus with his sons." Then southeast of the zenith shines Sirius the dog-star, to which Rome's haughty priests made sacrifice, and earlier yet, the dark Egyptian watched its glowing disc, his herald-star of harvest and the rising Nile, and older still, 'twas time-piece of old Thebes! Did you ever think as you watched its fair light, that Sirius was a near neighbor of ours, in the universe of God? It is, and yet were it to fly from its orbit towards the earth, at the rate of a million of miles each day, forty three thousand, three hundred years would roll by, before its journey would be done. Sixteen billions of miles! Who can comprehend it? Express it in figures: 16,000,000,000,000! Who can number it? And this, reader, this is a neighbor too! Take the wings of the morning light and visit it, and then, as you stand on that far-off isle, look away on, into the depths of immeasurable space, where thickly blaze the congregated fires of suns, perhaps the destined centres of new and nobler systems, which shall yet people some distant region of infinity! Who will say, even then, that mortal eye has seen or human. heart conceived, more than the suburbs, the very outskirts of created things? How do the starry hosts seem to lift up their voices together; how fearfully sublime the language, when, "The countless spheres of yonder sky, Catch up the wondrous strain; There issues from a million choirs, The same deep whisper--God! Who can look upon the red furnace-glow of a comet, with its fiery train of a million of miles, and not feel an undefinable sensation of awe, as in the presence of some strange, mysterious being? What worlds uncalendared, uncalculated, were dazzled by its glare; on what strange errand sent; when first it started on the mighty round; whether creation's morning was the time? If then, 'tis now just heaving into view from "The long travel of six thousand years." These, and a hundred other thoughts flash on the mind. But when we bid imagination trace its brilliant wake, back into the depths whence it emerged, or following on its guiding light, with it, "to double the mighty cape of heaven," and plunge again so far from home and earth, that thought and science never wandered there; then that comet tells us that its controlling power must be Almighty, nothing less! If one of the fixed stars should be, this moment extinguished, or obedient to the Word, should wheel in some new orbit beyond the bound of the far-seeing telescope, we should STILL behold it shining there bright as ever; astronomers would continue to number it among the stars, for it would still be counted one; its name would be often spoken among men, for its clear light would STILL keep flowing on, the long way down to earth.* Year after year might glide away, and the rays that left their birth-place last, would not tremble YET, upon the gazing eye! What does the quenched star seem to say? Is it not this? "You too, must leave a legacy behind-your influence! Let it be, like mine, a legacy of light, and then, long after you have been translated to that other firmament which Astronomers know not of, it will still linger, gilding the night and darkness of an evil world, with its own glory, as it beams, gladness and a guide to some weak, wavering heart." "So shines a good deed in this naughty world!" Such are the lessons of the stars, freely given as their own light; lessons of humility and immortality, of hope and faith. But we have already lingered long beneath the evening sky, and casting one glance more at that scroll of worlds, let me commend it, the noblest language of Nature and of night, to your further contemplation. The Fall of Niagara! The thundering waters! Who has not heard of that native home of clouds and ceaseless showers; of its walls of living rock, its rainbow-circled front, its awful flood, "poured, as if from God's own hollow hand?" Heard how forest trees, a moment tremble on the fearful verge, then plunge into the deep abyss, whirling and quivering there, throughout their giant frames, as light straws in the autumn blast? Who has not heard all this, and fancied, as he heard, how, when it burst upon his sight, its voice broke on his car, with awful grandeur far surpassing all the conceptions he had ever formed? * It is calculated that stars of the sixth magnitude are not less than 900 millions of millions of miles distant from the earth. How long would light be, in performing such a journey, moving 193,000 miles in a single second? |