150 THE EXPECTED RETURN OF THE COMET OF CHARLES V. evenings, especially if its perihelion passage should occur in the month of July; still it has been doubted whether it will equal in brilliancy Donati's comet, which formed so splendid and conspicuous an object in the evening sky during its perihelion passage about Michaelmas, 1858.* Mr. Hind states that, when the comet shall have passed its perihelion and be receding from the sun, it will pass within the earth's orbit near to that part traversed by the earth in the month of September; so that if the comet should be moving in that part of its orbit in the autumn, it will probably appear as a very large one, and at the beginning of September we should be distant from it about thirty-five millions of miles. In 1264, the distance of the comet from the earth seems to have been greater, or three-fifths of the mean distance of the earth from the sun. But although the reappearance of the comet supposed to be now on its way to visit us would establish its identity with the comet of 975, 1264, and 1556, and the wondrous fact that we may add to the list of known comets a body which revisits our solar system in a period little short of three hundred years, a still more extraordinary comet is known to astronomers—namely, the comet which was observed, for the fourth time, in 1680, its apparitions being separated by no less than five hundred and seventy-four years. This comet is considered (and, as Sir John Herschel remarks, with the highest appearance of probability) to be identical with a magnificent comet observed at Constantinople and in Palestine, and referred by contemporary historians, both European and Chinese, to the year 1105; with the comet of the time of Justinian (539), which was seen at noonday close to the sun; with the famous "Julian Star," or comet of the year 43 B.C., which was also observed in the daytime, recorded by Pliny to have appeared after the death of Cæsar, while the Emperor Augustus was celebrating the games of Venus Genetrix in Cæsar's honour; and, finally, though on merely conjectural grounds, with two other comets, mention of which occurs in the Sibylline oracles and in a passage of Homer, and which are referred—as well as the obscurity of chronology and the indications themselves will allow-to the years 618 and 1194 B.C. "Halley's comet," the comet of 1682 (the only known periodical comet which is retrograde, that is to say, which moves in a direction opposite to that of the planets about the sun), may likewise be traced back in history to a very early period, the eleventh year before Christ, and is, perhaps, more remarkable than the "Julian Star" for the terror it has occasioned. It was believed to presage the success of the Norman arms at the battle of Hastings; and in 1456 this comet-shaped like a scimitar-frightened alike the Turkish and the Christian host, but was made memorable by the sanguinary defeat of the Crescent before Belgrade. But the apparitions of the comet whose return is now expected were likewise omens of evil to the superstitious beholder: its appearance in 975, the year in which Edward the Martyr began the brief reign that was so soon terminated by the Danes, was observed to be immediately followed by the death of John Zimisces, Emperor of the East; in 1264 it disappeared (on the 2nd of October), when Pope Urban IV. died; and, in 1556, Charles V. is said to have regarded it as * Its distance at that time from the sun was computed at 55,000,000 miles. a presage of his approaching death, a fancy which, according to some historians, contributed to his abdication of the imperial crown in favour of his son Ferdinand, he having already renounced the crown of Spain in favour of Philip. But times and opinions have changed, and now the comet's fiery train will not "shed terror on gazing nations." It is not by any means as a subject of antiquarian curiosity only, or on account of the brilliant spectacle which comets occasionally afford, that so much interest appertains to them. To astronomers they have become (as Sir John Herschel remarks), through the medium of exact calculation, unexpected instruments of inquiry into points connected with the planetary system itself. Thus, ex. gr., the movements of the comet of Encke (so minutely and perseveringly traced by the eminent astronomer whose name is used to distinguish it) have afforded ground for believing in the existence of a resisting medium, filling the whole of our system, and the perturbation which comets experience in passing near any of the planets has afforded information as to the magnitude of the disturbing masses. Although the motions of comets are known to be regulated by the same general laws as those of the planets, and most comets likewise move in elliptical orbits, those orbits (the reader need not be reminded) are much more elongated than the planetary orbits, and of peculiar form. Thus, with regard to the comet now expected, its perihelion distance is 48,000,000 miles, but it recedes to the inconceivable distance of 8,300,000,000 at its greatest elongation, while the breadth of the minor axis of this orbit is 1,260,000,000 miles. A calculation has been made which conduces to an idea of the magnitude of this orbit: the comet will take a year to reach a distance equal to that of Jupiter from the sun, and thirty years to reach the distance of Neptune, the most remote of the known planets of our solar system, but it will not have attained the extreme limit of its orbit for a hundred and twenty years more-a distance which a traveller at twenty miles an hour could not reach under twenty thousand years. Well may comets, their physical constitution, their office in the universe, their magnitude, their wondrous movements, their singularity and mystery, and their periodical return from such regions of unknown worlds and starry depths of space, afford a perpetual stimulus to our curiosity and admiration! W. S. G. Mingle-Mangle by Monkshood. but made a mingle-mangle and a hotch-potch of it-I cannot tell what.BP. LATIMER's Sermons. ONCE A CHILD: NEVER A CHILD: ALWAYS A CHILD. IN THREE PARTS. PART I.-ONCE A CHILD. I HAD been looking in the morning at Lough's fine recumbent statue of Robert Southey-now laid out in white marble, within Crosthwaite Church. The impression of the old laureate's pinched features, and keen time-tried sorrow-worn aspect, gave fresh force and feeling to those lines of his, which I happened to light upon in the evening, while turning over, with random listlessness, his miscellaneous poems,-those tenderly retrospective lines, written by him in 1796, and headed "On My Own Miniature Picture, taken at Two Years of Age." Whatever contrast was suggested to the poet, then in the first flush of earliest manhood, between himself at three or four-and-twenty, and at tiny two,-how pathetically, to my remembrances, that contrast was now reinforced, by glancing at once from the monument of an over-worked veteran to the miniature of a little child. And I was once like this! that glowing cheek Was mine, those pleasure-sparkling eyes; that brow I search myself in vain, and find no trace Of what I was: those lightly arching lines Dark and o'erhanging now; and that sweet face The more than forty years that had elapsed between the writing of these lines, and the decease that called for that monument, could not but add strength, and new significance and salience, to every feature in the con trast. There is no end to the illustrations that might be given of a like kind. Look at Watson Gordon's portrait of Sir Walter Scott, taken two years before his death: an old man, leaning on his staff-with dimmed, careworn eyes, and a sad look as of paralysis about the mouth. Then look at the miniature that had been taken of him at Bath, some fifty-and-five years before, when little Walter counted his five summers of earthly life— a child with long-flowing chesnut hair, in a scarlet dress, with deep open collar-the outline of the face wonderfully like what it was to the last; and yet how different. Some dozen years before he died, Mr. Leigh Hunt attained his "grand climacteric," and wrote his Autobiography. In that work we come across the following passage, in its kind a parallel passage to the Southey retrospect. "The other day I found two songs of that period"-he is referring to the penultimate decade of the eighteenth century, 1780-90 -"on a music-stall, one by Mr. Hook, entitled Alone by the light of the Moon; the other a song with a French burden, Dans votre lit. They were the only songs I recollect singing when a child, and I looked on them with the accumulated tenderness of sixty-three years of age. I do not remember to have set eyes on them in the interval. What a difference between the little smooth-faced boy at his mother's knee, encouraged to lift up his voice to the pianoforte, and the battered grey-headed senior, looking again, for the first time, at what he had sung at the distance of more than half a century." Which suggests the reflection, that life often seems a dream, but that occasions there are when the sudden reappearance of early objects, by the intensity of their presence, not only renders the interval less present to the consciousness than a very dream, but makes the portion of life which preceded it seem to have been the most real of all things, and our only undreaming time.-Still the contrast stands out in all its salient grimness, a stubborn fact, an importunate reminder, the strange sad contrast between the man that is now "in years," and that was once a child. - There is always a charm in reverting to that, the only golden age that is not fabulous. Among friends, questioner and respondent are both interested in recalling the sweet childish time. "Come, I'll question you," Hermione tells Bohemia's king, "of my lord's tricks and yours, when you were boys; you were pretty lordlings then." Herm. Was not my lord the verier wag o' the two? Pol. We were as twinn'd lambs, that did frisk i' the sun, And bleat the one at the other: what we changed Was innocence for innocence; we knew not The doctrine of ill-doing, no, nor dream'd That any did: Had we pursued that life, And our weak spirits ne'er been higher rear'd With stronger blood, we should have answer'd heaven Boldly, Not guilty; the imposition clear'd Hereditary ours. Herm. By this we gather You have tripp'd since. Pol. O my most sacred lady, Temptations have since then been born to us.. .t It is later in the same scene, while the dangerous dialogue is going on 'twixt Sicilia's queen and Bohemia-dangerous in effect, in intent most innocent and loyal-that Leontes, fondling his boy Mamillus, his "sweet † Winter's Tale, Act I. Sc. 2. * Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, vol. i. villain," his "dearest," his "collop," or slice of his very self, breaks out into this bit of bygones, as a put-off or put-by to the queen's uneasiness at his altered mien: "You look," says poor, unwitting, guileless Hermione, As if you held a brow of much distraction: Leontes. No, in good earnest.— How sometimes nature will betray its folly, How like, methought, I then was to this kernel, Leontes is but a young man yet; but he is already a self-tormentor, a jealous husband, a tyrant in esse, and in posse a detestable poisoner and assassin. And all the while, vivid and tender is his remembrance that, not so long ago either, he was once a child. In a letter of Madame de Sévigné, now a grandmother of some standing, to the Président de Moulceau, whom she had been scolding, awhile previously, for the grumbling distaste he manifested at finding himself a grandfather, the lady renews her censure of the horreur he testified at cette dignité, and again presses her own example on him, and says, with the heroic Roman matron: Pate non dolet. "In fact," she goes on to say, "the case is not as people imagine: Providence leads us so benignantly through the different seasons of our life, that we are scarcely aware of the transition; each loss is so gentle as to be almost imperceptible: c'est l'aiguille du cadran que nous ne voyons pas aller." Could we, she continues, at twenty years of age, be made to see in a mirror the face we should have at sixty, there would be a revulsion of shocked fear and surprise-we should be horrified at this abruptly deformed figure; but in nature there are no such abrupt distortions; her declivities are gradual and gentle; there is a daily waste, a day-by-day transmutation; we look to-day as we did yesterday, and to-morrow as to-day. "Ainsi nous avançons sans le sentir, et c'est un miracle de cette Providence que j'adore." It is the abrupt comparison of six or seven with sixty or seventy, of the snows of life's winter night with the dews of the morning, that makes the alter et idem so startling an identity. Crabbe's lines by way of prelude to one of his most feeling Tales, express this principle with characteristic effect : Minutely trace man's life; year after year, Through all his days let all his deeds appear, And then, though some may in that life be strange, And no mysterious void is left between. But let those binding links be all destroy'd, * Mme. de Sévigné au Président de Moulceau, le 27 janvier 1687. |