astronomy at school, but had lacked talent to attain any real insight
into the subject. Now the constellations and certain of the stars began
to creep into my affections; they became the nightly witnesses of my
joys and sorrows, all through my life; the sight of them sometimes
comforted me when I felt lonely and forsaken in a foreign land. The
Lyre, the Swan, the Eagle, the Crown and Booetes, Auriga, the Hyades and
the Pleiades, and among the Winter constellations, Orion; all these
twinkling groups, that human eyes have sought for thousands of years,
became distant friends of mine, too. And the thoughts which the sight of
the countless globes involuntarily and inevitably evokes, were born in
me, too,--thoughts of the littleness of the earth in our Solar System,
and of our Solar System in the Universe, of immeasurable distances--so
great that the stars whose rays, with the rapidity of light's
travelling, are striking against our eyes now, may have gone out in our
childhood; of immeasurable periods of time, in which a human life, or
even the lifetime of a whole people, disappears like a drop in the
ocean. And whereas at school I had only studied astronomy as a subject,
from its mathematical aspect, I now learnt the results of spectroscopic
analysis, which showed me how the human genius of Bunsen and Kirchhoff
had annihilated the distance between the Earth and the Sun; and at the
same time I perceived the inherent improbability of the culture of our
Earth ever being transmitted to other worlds, even as the Earth had
never yet received communications from the civilisation of any of the
stars.

This circumstance, combined with the certainty of the gradual cooling
and eventual death of the Earth, gave me a conclusive impression of the
finality of all earthly existence and of the merely temporary character
of all progress.