According to the present state of our knowledge, it would be absurd to doubt the plurality of worlds. Like most truths, it is very ancient, having been taught by Anaxagoras, 450 years before Christ. The least enlightened peasant has now ceased to look up to golden studs in a sapphire canopy; and those whom education has led further by the hand, are convinced of the sublime fact, that they see in the stars distant rolling orbs, whose dimensions are not more wonderful than true: while others who are yet higher advanced on the hill of science, with strange accuracy can weigh them, measure them, see their atmosphere, note their inequalities, and amuse fancy by speculating on the nature of their probable inhabitants. Is it too wild a thought, that after the jubilee years of this earth's renovation are past and gone, the spirits of the just may visit those bubbles of creation on the sea of space? nay, that perhaps "each distant shining world may be a kingdom for one of the redeemed?"-In meditating on immortality, we use ourselves to hope,-(and if not truly, why have we ambition?)—that no desire of the soul shall be unsatisfied: and to a creature, whose essential joy it must be to dive into the works of his Creator, no desire can be imagined stronger than curiosity. The perfected man must have a free passport through space any thing like restraint qualifies his heaven. There will be a time when the body shall be the spirit's helpmate and truly it were little encouragement to the cultivation of the mind, if all that noble husbandry were confined to a few short years choked with the briars of worldly cares and sorrows. Science must be a growing, an eternal thing: the bliss of the redeemed will indeed be of the heart, but effected through the mind: proper affection is but the flower of intellect. Truth is immortal, and the pursuit of it, in all its paths converging up to God, is everlasting happiness. It is a great error, into which many well-meaning persons have fallen, to regard science as merely a thing of this world. Life is in every thing the door to unceasing progression; and the man of cultivated mind,-(always pre-supposing "the one thing needful," a saving faith,) enters on a spiritual world with advantages another has not: and perhaps in the glorious race towards Perfection, the spirit that sets forth with such a start, may keep it for ever: the philosopher in this life, (so he be a Christian,) may receive at once a higher capacity for intellectual pleasures in reward for intellectual exertion. The name Hipparchus, and the Herodotean character of these eccentric essays, (flying off as they do at the tangent of a word, after every suggested thought,) will induce the reader, who is un learned in ancient astronomy, to imagine that the brother of Hippias is intended, for he will remember that the Pisistratida were great encouragers of learning. That is not the case. We speak now of Hipparchus of Bithynia, who may be called the father of exact astronomy. Coming after Thales, Anaxagoras, and Aristarchus, he had great advantages: but his grand rule, which indeed led to his discoveries and usefulness, was, to take nothing for granted upon any unexamined authority however high. Accordingly he improved upon, and corrected all who had preceded him, and Claudius Ptolemy of Ptolemais, nearly three centuries later, confessed he could do little better than follow Hipparchus. Unfortunately however for the fame of the great Bithynian astronomer, his principal works were all destroyed at the burning of the Alexandrian library by the Caliph Omar, A. D. 642. We know of them only through Ptolemy, in a work with an Arabic name, the bare mention of which would be a parallel to the witty" Sanchoniathon, Manetho, and Berosus" of Oliver Goldsmith. With regard to Hipparchus, to say something less indefinitely, he was the first to make solar tables, a catalogue of the fixed stars, and various discoveries with regard to the equinoxes, the tropical year, the latitude and longitude, and trigonometry, a more distinct enumeration of which, however, would involve us too much in the technicalities of science. He flourished about 140 A. C. CORNELIA. O JEWELS beyond price, uncounted gold, In you The highest earthly good of mortal aim: Yon toothless darling at the mother's breast,- Those gentle daughters, and these manly sons, One reason, and it is to be feared a too sufficient one, for the rarity of unblemished female excellence in the pages of ungallant history, has already been given to the reader in the section on Sappho. The heroes of olden time would appear to have been very unequally mated: but doubtless another ample reason for the silence of history in respect of the gentler sex, is to be found in the retiring modesty of their average character, and the quiet domesticity of their duties. Home, that cool resting-place for hot ambitious man, that private world of unrecorded heroism, is the true scene of woman's glory, the arena of her unostentatious triumphs: the noiseless exploits of anxious, affectionate, self-forgetting, woman weigh to more honour in the balance of the sanctuary than the more boastful achievements of man: and, after all, it may be her praise that history, which amounts to little more than a record of splendid crimes, has "left her alone with her glory," untarnished by commendation. The noble Cornelia, daughter of Scipio Africanus, and even better known as mother of the Gracchi, was an'honourable type of her sex. The anecdote currently reported of her, that she showed to a purse-proud friend, her children as her jewels, is, as it ought to be, a trite tale: it was a beautiful thought, and |