shine and raindrops, in the lightning and flame. It prevails in the waterfall and the stormy sea; and, although the whole range of human experience is all too short to afford a parallax by which the date of the extinction of matter can be calculated, protile '—the' formless mist'— may once again reign supreme, and the hourhand of eternity will have completed one revolution."

In the Middle Ages the cosmic emotion was narrowed by the limits of the Ptolemaic system, and Dante in spite of his stupendous genius gives us in his "Paradiso Paradiso" rather a geometrical than a cosmic universe. It is especially in more recent times, that with the advancing knowledge of the infinite universe this cosmic emotion finds its fullest expression. The idea of the earth, whirling through space like a great ship on which "all peoples of the globe together sail, sail the same voyage, are bound for the same destination," seems especially to touch the imagination. Banks and exchanges, says Emerson, are not built on solid granite, "but on a mass of un

known materials and solidity, red-hot or whitehot, perhaps at the core, which rounds off to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft air and goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it at a rate of thousands of miles an hour, he knows not whither." The same cosmic conception has been imitated in verse by William Vaughan Moody in his 'World Ship."

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This earth is not the steadfast place

We landsmen build upon;

From deep to deep she varies pace,
And while she comes is gone.
Beneath my feet I feel
Her smooth hulk heave and dip;
With velvet plunge and soft upreel
She swings and steadies to her keel,
Like a gallant, gallant ship.

Of all modern writers Walt Whitman possessed in the highest degree this faculty of cosmic imagination. With him it was associated with a remarkable power of realizing abstraction. His mind sees things as wholes; space fascinates him, O, he cries

O to realize space!

The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying cloud as one of them.

With the same mighty power of imaginative abstraction, he sees the earth as a whole, as in the magnificent lines:

Smile, O voluptuous earth, cool-breath'd earth!

Earth of the slumb'ring and liquid trees! Earth of departed sunsets! Earth of mountains, misty topt!

Earth of the shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!

Earth of the limpid gray of clouds, brighter and clearer for thy sake!

Far swooping, elbow'd earth! rich, apple-blossomed earth!

Smile for your lover comes.

This all-embracing view of the universe is fraught for many persons with a feeling of terror and fear; there is a cosmic gloom as well as a cosmic glory. As Lucretius had been overwhelmed with the crushing immensity of the world as he saw it then; and as Pascal had

been terrified by "le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis;" so Herbert Spencer in our own time, declares that "the thought of a space compared with which our immeasurable, sidereal system dwindles to a point, is a thought too overwhelming to be dwelt upon." And again he says:-"Of late years the thought that without origin or cause infinite space has ever existed and must ever exist, produces in me a feeling from which I shrink."

All those who believe in no God, in no spiritual or transcendental world, stand in horror at the awful spectacle of the cosmic process. This tragedy of science, as it has been called, is nowhere more forcefully described than by Mr. Balfour in his "Foundations of Belief":-" We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short, indeed, compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our

system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. 'Imperishable monuments' and 'immortal deeds,' death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or be worse for all that the labor, genius, devotion and suffering of man have striven through countless generations to effect."

This cosmic sadness has found beautiful expression in Italy in the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi, and in England is represented by Matthew Arnold, whose "Dover Beach may be taken as the "locus classicus" of the despair that comes from the contemplation of the universe by one who has lost his faith: