epitaphs were the praises over the Madeira they had saved.
*****
Mr. Hollingsworth never forgot the liquor which, as Pope says, was
At once their vinegar and wine.
THE COMET OF 1861.
Sunday night: a bright soft cloudless summer night. The bells of the old church of St. Thomas, Portsmouth, had just chimed one, and numberless other bells swung by human hands were doubly echoing the leader’s signal from the decks of the men-of-war lying far up the noble harbour. I closed the book in which I had been writing-up the journal of the past week, as it always is my custom to log it down, for evil or for good, before beginning the work of a new week; and, with a weary yawn, turned away to undress. As I passed the window I suddenly caught sight of a blaze of white light, spreading high into the expanse of the heavens, and looking attentively and wonderingly at it, I perceived that it was a great and very beautiful comet. I threw up the window to look the better at it, and then the murmur of the distant city came towards me, to tell me that many other eyes beside mine were gazing on that glorious object. It well deserved that title, for the size of the stranger appeared greater than any I had ever seen before, its nucleus being clear and brilliant, and its wide-spread tail, with an inclination but slightly inclined from the perpendicular, clearly visible beyond the zenith. I felt dazzled with the beauty of my new discovery, and began to feel a longing for sympathy in the matter, and a desire as well that others should see and admire. I ran down stairs and roused my wife, her sister, and her maid. I told them of the magnificent sight now visible. They were in their first sleep, and did not appreciate the news. None of them would move; I felt keenly disappointed. So I pressed them with accounts of its dazzling beauty, urging them to wake and come to see what they might bitterly regret missing. At last I was successful: dressing-gowns with many groans were huddled on, caps doffed, and slippers donned; and with a cautious peep that no candles were lighted, out they stole, shivering and unconverted as to the necessity. But when they approached the window and saw the magnificence of the heavenly stranger, they exclaimed with delight that they would not have lost the chance for anything they knew. I felt proud and elated, pointing out to them the spread of the soft light as it died and melted away in the deep blue of the high vault of the sky, and the flickerings which every now and then appeared to spring from the bright star out of which all this luminous vapour appeared to flow. Then, as they stole back, awed yet rejoicing, to bed again, I closed the window to follow their example; and while I did so two thoughts upon this glorious theme came across me, which I think I will jot down on an extra leaf of my journal. The first was, as to what we really know about comets in the year of grace 1861.
Well, perhaps we may sum that up in saying that we have discovered a little about the motions of these luminous travellers through space, but of what they are composed, or whether they have any specific gravity at all, we know absolutely nothing. Still it is not a small triumph to be able in some measure to define the form of the orbit of a body which performs its mighty journey around our common centre, the sun, in more years than this great globe takes days to do the same. Still more is it to have set at rest those extravagant notions which perplexed nations, confounded emperors and kings, and set up gaunt superstition upon its tall stalking horse to prey on cruelty and ignorance. Even in more modern, and therefore happily more enlightened times, the fear of a brush of the tail of one such visitor brought sad tribulation in its train; but the matter which once was thought to engulph the world in destruction is now looked on with calmer eyes—Mr. Hind asserting that we really were in the tail of our present friend at the moment these thoughts were passing through my brain—and we saw, nearly two years ago, that the satellites of our big brother Jupiter endured a very considerable embrace without any evil result. If, then, when in actual contact they are harmlesss, surely at a distance, and in their significative or prophetic bearing, they may be held to be equally so. The day has thus passed away when men are likely to be moved to crime and fear by the apparition of
Threatening the world wThe blazing star
Threatening the world with famine, plague, and war:
To princes death; to kingdoms many crosses:
To all estates inevitable losses:
To herdsmen rot; to ploughmen hapless seasons:
To sailors storms; to cities civil treasons.
