COSMIC EVOLUTION 



days. From the formation of one nebula to its 

 phoenix - like end in the formation of another, is 

 surely the wave - length of the great vibration. 

 Do we want a great measure of time an annus 

 magnusf Surely this, the epoch between two 

 nebulae, might be taken as the unit wherewith 

 faintly and with unutterable unsuccess to measure 

 eternity. The rhythm of universal history, the 

 strides of the eternal, are from nebula to nebula. 



And we ? ephemeral dwellers on the doomed 

 satellite of a dying sun; we, to whom a scroll so 

 sempiternal has been unfolded how does it all 

 strike us, as from our stand-point between two 

 nebulas we survey the Cosmos of which we are, if 

 an ephemeral, yet an inalienable part? For our 

 bodily substance has a past how long and glorious, 

 a future how fraught with possibility ! The atoms 

 in the tear wherewith your winking eyelid has just 

 now for its benefit moistened your eyeball, 

 where were they when the solar nebula reached out 

 as far as Neptune ? Or can you figure them borne 

 on some precedent world and scattered in affright 

 when it collided with another? Or can you trace 

 them further back still, in an illimitable past, or 

 forward to an illimitable future ? They may have 

 moistened the eyes of a greater than Shakespeare 

 in the course of the history of the last nebula but 

 one, or, gathered into overflowing tears, they may 

 express the agony of sorrow or the ecstasy of joy 

 in some heart like yours that may beat in the course 

 of cosmic evolution some ten or a billion nebulas 

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