rief a time suffices for all things to change! Serene-fronted
Nature, too soon you will forget!... in your metamorphoses
ruthlessly snapping the cords that bind our hearts together!

Others will pass where we pass; we have arrived, and others will
arrive after us: the thought sketched out by our souls will be
pursued by theirs ... and they will not find the solution of it.

For no one here begins or finishes: the worst are as the best of
humans; we all awake at the same moment of the dream: we all begin
in this world, and end otherwhere.

Reply, sweet valley, reply, solitude; O Nature, sheltering in this
splendid desert, when we are both asleep, and cast by the tomb into
the attitude of pensive death.

Will you to the last verge be so insensible, that, knowing us lost,
and dead with our loves, you will pursue your cheerful feast, and
smile, and sing always?

Yes, mortals may say that when they are sleeping in the grave, spring
and summer will still smile and sing; husband and wife may ask
themselves if they will meet again some day, in another sphere; but do
we not _feel_ that our destinies can not be terminated here, and that
short of absolute and final nonentity for everything, they must be
renewed beyond, in that starry Heaven to which every dream has flown
instinctively since the first origins of Humanity?

As our planet is only a province of the Infinite Heavens, so our actual
existence is only a stage in Eternal Life. Astronomy, by giving us
wings, conducts us to the sanctuary of truth. The specter of death has
departed from our Heaven. The beams of every star shed a ray of hope
into our hearts. On each sphere Nature chants the paean of Life Eternal.

THE END

INDEX

A

Aberration, 300

Adams, 168

Agnesi, Marie, 5

Alcar, 34

Aldebaran, 44, 66

Alexandria, 3

Algol, 39

Ancients, views of, 30

Andrew Ellicot, 195

Andromeda, 37, 38

Angles, 289

Antares, 45, 66, 70

Antipodes, 208

Arago, 275

Arcturus, 39, 66

Asteroids, 146, 195

Astronomie des Dames, 9

Attraction, 208

Aureole, 279

Autumn Constellations, 54

Axis, 225

B

Babylonian Tables, 30

Bartholomew Diaz, 176

Bear, Little, 35
Great, 32, 34, 35

Betelgeuse, 49, 66

Biela's Comet, 189, 198

Bode's law, 167

Bolides, 201

C

Cancer, 72