THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE 



Yet what were the awe of this moment com- 

 pared to another immeasurably more sublime! 

 Indeed, only our imagination can conceive it. 

 Let us imagine that there sounded through 

 space the magic words, "Vanish, you dark arch 

 above," and that before us there suddenly flamed 

 the boundless starry heavens with its myriads 

 of silver worlds. Imagine that it were given 

 to us to pass through this icy world space as 

 the ship of Columbus steered over the barren 

 ocean, — and that before us appeared for the 

 first time, also after an endless journey, the 

 whole earth, — as a star, — this whole colossal 

 globe with all its snowy mountains and blue 

 oceans, with its green woodlands and yellow 

 deserts, with the white ice fields of its poles 

 around which quiver the red crown of the 

 northern and southern lights — all compre- 

 hended in a single point of still, soft, white 

 star-light like beautiful Venus, the old so-called 

 star of love — a star among stars. 



This is one of the most sublime pictures of 

 which the mind of man can dream. All around 

 are processions of other stars. A system that 

 surpasses all of our accepted ideas of space ex- 

 tends through the boundless heavens: the whole 

 fixed star system to which almost all of yonder 

 stars belong. Probably this system takes in 

 general the form of a spiral, a nebulous spiral 

 composed of numerous isolated suns. When we 

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