Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/68

 infinite integral whole. The different worlds and their satellites above and around us, are only far removed world-quarters. The moon is but a smaller, more distant America, and space is the ocean."

Nadine said: "One day I so pictured the inhabitants of a lemon-tree to myself. The worm on the leaf may think it is on the green earth, the second worm on the white bud is on the moon, and the one on the lemon believes itself to be upon the sun."

"And yet this," said I, "is but a tree of immeasurable life. As around the earth-kernel cling wider and finer covers,—the earth, the seas, the air and space,—so the giant of one world is surrounded by increasingly large ones, with ever larger arms. The longest shell is the finest one, as light and the attractive power. The beauteous covering elongates and rarefies itself from iron bands to pearl ties, from flower-chains to rainbows and milky-ways."

"Will we not now descend from the milky-way," said Karlson, "for we cannot ascend it. It is precisely this uniformity of the universe which forbids the rambling of emigrants from the earth. Every planet already has its own crew; more dense ones, as for instance Mercury, may be peopled with real sailors."

"Precisely as Kant supposes!" said Phylax.

"Finer, less solid ones, as e. g. Uranus, only with the most tender beings, perhaps only with women and nuns who love not the sun. He who intends to rectify the so-called soul or spirit by distilling it from one planet to the other, may with as much justice assert, that the spirits of the slacked Mercury receive their dephlegmation in a distilling process through our earth,—in short, that the earth is the second world for Mercury and Venus. The dead