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Had Milton's 'incestuous mother, with her fleshless son, and with the warrior angel, his father, that led the rebellions of heaven, been suddenly unmasked by Lord Rosse's instrument, in these dreadful distances before which, simply as expressions of resistance, the mind of man shudders and recoils, there would have been nothing more appalling in the exposure; in fact, it would have been essentially the same exposure: the same expression of power in the detestable phantom, the same rebellion in the attitude, the same pomp of malice in the features to a universe seasoned for its assaults.
But there is a picture, the pendant of the Memnon, there is a dreadful cartoon, from the gallery which has begun to open upon Lord Rosse's telescope, where the appropriate atmosphere for investing it must be drawn from another silence, from the frost and from the eternities of death.
A new era for the human intellect, upon a path that lies amongst its most aspiring, is promised, is inaugurated, by Lord Rosse's almost awful telescope. What is it then that Lord Rosse has accomplished?
Far from our Milky Way, there they lie, other universes, rebuke resolved by Rosse's telescope into stars, starry realms, numerous, seemingly innumerable, and as vast as our system; and yet from some of them it takes the light thirty sixty thousand years to come to us: nay, twenty millions, Nichol suggests, I know not on what grounds. And yet in the minutest details such perfection!
It does not trouble them at all to see the watery spheres that round themselves into being out of the vapors floating over us; they are nothing but raindrops. But if a planet can grow as a rain-drop grows, why then It was a great comfort to these timid folk when Lord Rosse's telescope resolved certain nebula into star-clusters.
Within thirty feet of the turf-sided road, my chimney a huge, corpulent old Harry VIII of a chimney rises full in front of me and all my possessions. Standing well up a hillside, my chimney, like Lord Rosse's monster telescope, swung vertical to hit the meridian moon, is the first object to greet the approaching traveler's eye, nor is it the last which the sun salutes.
To say that the thing could not have been done otherwise, is just to say that you forget the art in beholding its object, that you forget the mirror because you see nature reflected in the mirror. Any one can see the moon in Lord Rosse's telescope; but who made the reflector? And let the student try to express anything in prose or in verse, in painting or in modelling, just as it is.
Where the five hundred guns came from, it was easy to divine; for, knowing that I used a sextant, my connection with government was a thing of course; and, as I must know all her majesty's counsels, I was questioned on the subject of the indistinct rumors which had reached them of Lord Rosse's telescope.
On his report I know I could quite rely. As for Lord Rosse's great reflector, I can only tell you what I hear, having never seen it, or even his three feet one. The great one is not yet completed. Of the other, those who have looked through it speak in raptures.
Boeddicker, with Lord Rosse's 3-foot reflector and a Thermopile to measure the heat, and Mr. Frank Very, with a glass reflector of 12 inches diameter and the Bolometer invented by Mr. Langley.
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