onfidence. The
day may yet be coming when our instruments of observation shall
be inconceivably more powerful. They may ascertain still more
decisive points of resemblance. They may resolve the same question
by the evidence of sense which is now so abundantly convincing
by the evidence of analogy. They may lay open to us the
unquestionable vestiges of art, and industry, and intelligence. We
may see summer throwing its green mantle over those mighty tracts,
and we may see them left naked and colourless after the flush of
vegetation has disappeared. In the progress of years or of centuries,
we may trace the hand of cultivation spreading a new aspect over
some portion of a planetary surface. Perhaps some large city, the
metropolis of a mighty empire, may expand into a visible spot by
the powers of some future telescope. Perhaps the glass of some
observer, in a distant age, may enable him to construct the map of
another world, and to lay down the surface of it in all its minute and
topical varieties. But there is no end of conjecture; and to the men of
other times we leave the full assurance of what we can assert with
the highest probability, that yon planetary orbs are so many worlds,
that they teem with life, and that the mighty Being who presides in
high authority over this scene of grandeur and astonishment has
there planted the worshippers of His glory." [460]

How fine is this outburst of the great Scotch orator! He spoke as one
inspired with prophetic foreknowledge; for in less than twenty years
after this utterance, Beer and Maedler published their splendid
_Mappe Selenographica_, or map of the moon; and photography
offered its aid to the fuller delineation of our silvery satellite. Who
can tell what the last fifteen years of this eventful century may
develop in the same direction? Verily these intuitions of reason
seem often favoured with an apocalypse of coming disclosures; and,
if we may venture to adopt with slight alteration a sentence of
Shelley, we will say: "It is impossible to read the compositions of
the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled
with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure
the circumference and sound the depths of nature with a
comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves
perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is
less their spirit than the spirit of the age." The poets of science, in
their an