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Mitchell has already remarked how little probable it is that the stars in the Pleiades, for example, could have been contracted into the small space which encloses them by the fortuity of chance alone, and he has concluded that this group of stars, and similar groups which the skies present to us, are the necessary result of the condensation of a nebula, with several nuclei, and it is evident that a nebula, by continually contracting, towards these various nuclei, at length would form a group of stars similar to the Pleiades.
But since Maedler's time it has been demonstrated that the Pleiades cannot be the center of revolution of the universe, and, as already remarked, all attempts to find or fix such a center have proved abortive. Yet so powerful was the hold that the theory took upon the popular imagination, that even today astronomers are often asked if Alcyone is not the probable site of ``Jerusalem the Golden.
The "rows of stars," so often noticed in the sky, may, then, be concluded to have more than an imaginary existence. Of the 2,326 stars recorded in these pictures, a couple of hundred among the brightest can, at the outside, be reckoned as genuine Pleiades.
'Look sharp! cried a voice that fell from the sky above them. 'Here come the Morning Spiders, On their gossamer outriders! This time it was the Lamplighter flashing to and fro as he put the stars out one by one. He was in a frantic hurry; he extinguished whole groups of them at once. The Pleiades were the last to fade. Rogers heard him and came back into himself.
He was in the Den, but the Den was in the universe, and to the scale of the universe he set the little homely, commonplace picture. Life, he realised, is thought and feeling; and just then he thought and felt like a god. He was Orion, and Orion had at last overtaken the Pleiades. The fairest of the cluster lay caught within his giant arms.
When the Pleiades had risen, Nebenchari was to be found seated alone in one of the magnificent rooms assigned to his use on the eastern side of the palace, near to Kassandane's apartments. The friendly manner in which he had welcomed his old servant had given place to the serious expression which his face usually wore, and which had led the cheerful Persians to call him a morose and gloomy man.
Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, Or loose the bands of Orion? The feeling that something was going to happen that odd sense of anticipation which all had experienced the evening before at tea-time had entirely vanished, of course, next morning. It was a mood, and it had passed away. Every one had slept it off. They little realised how it had justified itself.
Mars is fetia ura, the red star; the Pleiades are Matarii, the little eyes; and the Southern Cross, Tauha, Fetia ave are the comets, the "stars with a tail," and the meteors pao, opurei, patau, and pitau. The moon was gone, but the stars needed no help, for they shone as if the trump of doom were due at dawn, and they should be no more.
We can see the Pleiades best by not looking directly at, but somewhat away from, them; and just as pleasure, if made the direct object of life, ceases to be pleasure, so the world's goods, if taken for our chief aim, cease to yield even the imperfect good which they can bestow.
He turned to the western horizon, to the spot where the Pleiades had just set for the summer months, and lifting his glass moved it slowly up towards Capella and the Kids, thence on to Perseus, and that most gorgeous tract of the Milky Way which lies thereby.
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