Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/780

756 that, and, having thus fixed its position in your mind, try to find it with the opera-glass. Its distance is a little over half that between Mizar and Alcor. It is of a reddish color. You will notice nearly overhead three pairs of pretty bright stars in a long, bending row, about half-way between Leo and the Dipper. These mark three of Ursa Major's feet, and each of the pairs is well worth looking at with a glass, as they are beautifully grouped with stars invisible to the naked eye. The letters used to designate the stars forming these pairs will be found upon our little map of Ursa Major. The scattered group of faint stars beyond the bowl of the Dipper forms in the Bear's head, and you will find that also a field worth a few minutes' exploration.

But, after all, no one can expect to derive from such studies as these any genuine pleasure or satisfaction unless he is mindful of the real meaning of what he sees. The actual truth seems almost too stupendous for belief. The mind must be brought into an attitude of profound contemplation in order to appreciate it. From this globe we can look out in every direction into the open and boundless universe. Blinded and dazzled during the day by the blaze of that star, of which the earth is a near and humble dependent, we are shut in as by a curtain. But at night, when our own star is hidden, our vision ranges into the depths of creation, and we behold them sparkling with a multitude of other suns. With so simple an aid as that of an opera-glass, we penetrate still deeper into the profundities of space, and thousands more of these strange, far-away suns come into sight. They are arranged in pairs, sets, rows, streams, clusters—here they gleam alone in distant splendor, there they glow and flash in mighty swarms. This is a look into heaven more splendid than the materializing imagination of Bunyan pictured; here is a celestial city whose temples are suns, and whose streets are the pathways of light.