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the porter, that the nuns were now at the altar performing silent mass, and that the doors were shortly to be closed, re called his recollection.

Grandeur of astronomical Discoveries.-WIRT.

It was a pleasant evening in the month of May; and my sweet child, my Rosalie, and I had sauntered up to the castle's top to enjoy the breeze that played around it, and to admire the unclouded firmament, that glowed and sparkled with unusual lustre from pole to pole. The atmosphere was in its purest and finest state for vision; the milky way was distinctly developed throughout its whole extent; every planet and every star above the horizon, however near and brilliant or distant and faint, lent its lambent light or twinkling ray to give variety and beauty to the hemisphere; while the round, bright moon (so distinctly defined were the lines of her figure, and so clearly visible even the rotundity of her form) seemed to hang off from the azure vault, suspended in midway air; or stooping forward from the firmament her fair and radiant face, as if to court and return our gaze.

We amused ourselves for some time, in observing through a telescope the planet Jupiter, sailing in silent majesty with his squadron of satellites along the vast ocean of space between us and the fixed stars; and admired the felicity of that design, by which those distant bodies had been parcelled out and arranged into constellations; so as to have served not only for beacons to the ancient navigator, but, as it were, for landmarks to astronomers at this day; enabling them, though in different countries, to indicate to each other with ease the place and motion of those planets, comets and magnificent meteors, which inhabit, revolve, and play in the intermediate space.

We recalled and dwelt with delight on the rise and progress of the science of astronomy; on that series of aston, ishing discoveries through successive ages, which displayin so strong a light, the force and reach of the human mind; and on those bold conjectures and sublime reveries,

which seem to tower even to the confines of divinity, and denote the high destiny to which mortals tend:-that thought, for instance, which is said to have been first start ed by Pythagoras, and which modern astronomers approve; that the stars which we call fixed, although they appear to us to be nothing more than large spangles of various sizes glittering on the same concave surface, are, nevertheless, bodies as large as our sun, shining, like him, with original and not reflected light, placed at incalculable distances asunder, and each star the solar centre of a system of planEts, which revolve around it as the planets belonging to our system do around the sun; that this is not only the case with all the stars which our eyes discern in the firmament, or which the telescope has brought within the sphere of our vision, but, according to the modern improvements of this thought, that there are probably other stars, whose light has not yet reached us, although light moves with a velocity a million times greater than that of a cannon ball; that those luminous appearances, which we observe in the firmament, like flakes of thin, white cloud, are windows, as it were, which open to other firmaments, far, far beyond the ken of human eye, or the power of optical instruments, lighted up, like ours, with hosts of stars or suns; that this scheme goes on through infinite space, which is filled with thousands upon thousands of those suns, attended by ten thousand times ten thousand worlds, all in rapid motion, yet calm, regular and harmonious, invariably keeping the paths prescribed to them; and these worlds peopled with myriads of intelligent beings.

One would think that this conception, thus extended, would be bold enough to satisfy the whole enterprise of the human imagination. But what an accession of glory and magnificence does Dr. Herschell superadd to it, when, instead of supposing all those suns fixed, and the motion confined to their respective planets, he loosens those multitudinous suns themselves from their stations, sets them all into motion with their splendid retinue of planets and satellites, and imagines them, thus attended, to perform a stupendous revolution, system above system, around some grander, unknown centre, somewhere in the boundless abyss of space!-and when, carrying on the process, you sup

pose even that centre itself not stationary, but also coun terpoised by other masses in the immensity of spaces, with which, attended by their accumulated trains of

"Planets, suns, and adamantine spheres

Wheeling unshaken through the void immense,"

it maintains harmonious concert, surrounding, in its vast career, some other centre still more remote and stupendous, which in its turn-"You overwhelm me," cried Rosalie, as I was labouring to pursue the immense concatenation;-"my mind is bewildered and lost in the effort to follow you, and finds no point on which to rest its weary wing."-"Yet there is a point, my dear Rosalie-the throne of the Most High. Imagine that the ultimate centre, to which this vast and inconceivably magnificent and august apparatus is attached, and around which it is continually revolving. Oh! what a spectacle for the cherubim and seraphim, and the spirits of the just made perfect, who dwell on the right hand of that throne, if, as may be, and probably is, the case, their eyes are permitted to pierce through the whole, and take in, at one glance, all its order, beauty, sublimity and glory, and their ears to distinguish that celestial harmony, unheard by us, in which those vast globes, as they roll on in their respective orbits, continually hymn their great Creator's praise!"

Scenes on the Prairies.-ANONYMOUS.

ON .hese level plains some of my dreams of the pleasures of wandering were realized. We were all in the morning of life, full of health and spirits, on horseback and breathing a most salubrious air, with a boundless horizon open before us, and, shaping our future fortune and success in the elastic mould of youthful hope and imagination, we could hardly be other than happy. Sometimes we saw, scouring away from our path, horses, asses, mules, buffaloes and wolves, in countless multitudes, and we took, almost with too much ease to give pleasure in the chase, whatever we needed for luxurious subsistence. The pas