Page:The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Volume 2).djvu/417

Rh As to the Devil, and the imps, and the damned living in the Sun, why there is no great probability of it. The Comets are better fitted for this; except that some astronomer has suggested the possibility of their orbits gradually becoming ecliptical, until at last they might arrange themselves in orbits concentric with the planets, lose their heat and their substance, become subject to the same laws of animal and vegetable life as those according to which the substance of the surface of the others is arranged. The Devils and the damned, without some miraculous interposition would then be the inhabitants of a very agreeable world; and as they probably would have become very good friends from a community of misfortune and the experience which time gives those who live long enough of the folly of quarrelling—would probably administer the affairs of their Colony with great harmony and success. But there is an objection to this whole theory of solar and planetary Hells; which is, that there is no proof that the Sun and the Comets are themselves burning. It is the same with fire as with wit. A man may not be witty himself as Falstaff was, though like him he may be the cause of wit in others. So the Sun, though the cause of fire, may only develope a limited proportion of that principle on its own surface. Herschel's discoveries incline to a presumption that this is actually the case. He has discovered that the cause of light and heat is not the burning body of the Sun itself; but a shell as it were of phosphoric vapours, suspended many thousand miles in the atmosphere of that body. These vapours surround the sphere of the Sun at a distance, which has not been accurately computed, but which is assuredly very great, encircling and canopying it with a vault of ætherial