supposition is a literal truth; and the light of
those suns, whose twilight thus bowed down that mighty intellect in
reverent adoration, now shines before human eyes in all its noonday
refulgence. One of the most remarkable of these nebulae--one which is
visible to a good eye in the belt of Orion--has been disclosed to the
observers at Parsontown as a firmament; and minute points, scarce
perceptible to common telescopes, blaze forth as magnificent clusters of
glorious stars, so close and crowded, that no figure can adequately
describe them, save the twin symbol of the promise, "the sand by the
seashore," or "the dust of the earth." "There is a minute point, near
Polaris," says Nichol, "so minute, that it requires a good telescope to
discern its being. I have seen it as represented by a good mirror,
blazing like a star of the first magnitude; and though examined by a
potent microscope, clear and definite as the distinctest of these our
nearest orbs, when beheld through an atmosphere not disturbed. Nay,
through distances of an order I shall scarcely name, I have seen a mass
of orbs compressed and brilliant, so that each touched on each other,
_like the separate grains of a handful of sand_, and yet there seemed no
melting or fusion of any one of the points into the surrounding mass.
Each sparkled individually its light pure and apart, like that of any
constituent of the cluster of the Pleiades."[314]

"The larger and nearer masses are seen with sufficient distinctness to
reveal the grand fact decisive of their character, viz: that they
consist of multitudes of closely related orbs, forming an independent
system. In other cases we find the individual stars by no means so
clearly defined. Through effect, in all probability, of distance, the
intervals between them appear much less, the shining points themselves
being also fainter; while the masses still further off _may be best
likened to a handful of golden sand, or, as it is aptly termed, star
dust_; beyond which no stars, or any vestige of them, are seen, but only
a patch or streak of milky light, similar to the unresolved portions of
our surrounding zone."[315]

To say, then, that the stars of the sky are actually innumerable is only
a cold statement of the plainest fact. Hear it in the language of one
privileged to behold the glories of one out of the thousands of similar
firmaments: "The mottled region forming the lighter part of the mass
(the nebula in Orion) is a ve