Astronomy for Amateurs

Автор: Camille Flammarion
Издательство: D.APPLETON AND COMPANY
Страниц: 345
Год: 1915
Размер: 8,44 МБ

THE Science of Astronomy is sublime and beautiful. Noble, elevating, consoling, divine, it gives us wings, and bears us through Infinitude. In these thereal regions all is pure, luminous, and splendid. Dreams of the Ideal, even of the Inaccessible, weave their subtle spells upon us. The imagination soars aloft, and aspires to the sources of Eternal Beauty.

What greater delight can be conceived, on a fine spring evening, at the hour when the crescent moon is shining in the West amid the last glimmer of wilight, than the contemplation of that grand and silent spectacle of the stars stepping forth in sequence in the vast Heavens ? All sounds of life die out upon the earth, the last notes of the sleepy birds have sunk away, the Angelus of the church hard by has rung the close of day. But if life is rrested around us, we may seek it in the Heavens. These incandescing orbs are so many points of interrogation suspended above our heads in the inaccessible depths of space. . . .