HELTER-SKELTER FLIGHT OF THE STARS 327 



conjecture into the realms of dream. Neither earth nor sky 

 nor suns stand still. There is nothing fixed, nothing at rest. 

 The suns are tumbling headlong, shooting each whither, upwards, 

 downwards, in every direction, dragging with them their progeny 

 of helpless satellites. 



Could Lucretius return, could his intellectual godfather, 

 Democritus, come again among men, how marvellously they 

 would find their previsions fulfilled ; for, seen through the eye 

 of the telescope, is it not, as their vast imaginations conceived, 

 less a cosmos than a chaos into which we are born, wherein 

 there seems nothing but blind confusion, a hopeless disorder, 

 a wildly scattered rout, a drunken revelry of dancing suns ? 



