Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers, vol 2 | Page 7

into some silent garden, I
believe, or some forest lawn; and the opening words were, 'Come, and I
will show you what is beautiful!' Well, and what beside? There is
nothing beside; oh, disappointed and therefore enraged reader;
positively this is the sum-total of what I can recall from the wreck of
years; and certainly it is not much. Even of Sappho, though time has
made mere ducks and drakes of her lyrics, we have rather more spared

to us than this. And yet this trifle, simple as you think it, this shred of a
fragment, if the reader will believe me, still echoes with luxurious
sweetness in my ears, from some unaccountable hide-and- seek of
fugitive childish memories; just as a marine shell, if applied steadily to
the ear, awakens (according to the fine image of Landor [Footnote: 'Of
Landor,' viz., in his 'Gebir;' but also of Wordsworth in 'The Excursion.'
And I must tell the reader, that a contest raged at one time as to the
original property in this image, not much less keen than that between
Neptune and Minerva, for the chancellorship of Athens.]) the great
vision of the sea; places the listener
'In the sun's palace-porch, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.'
Now, on some moonless night, in some fitting condition of the
atmosphere, if Lord Rosse would permit the reader and myself to walk
into the front drawing-room of his telescope, then, in Mrs. Barbauld's
words, slightly varied, I might say to him,--Come, and I will show you
what is sublime! In fact, what I am going to lay before him, from Dr.
Nichol's work, is, or at least would be, (when translated into Hebrew
grandeur by the mighty telescope,) a step above even that object which
some four-and-twenty years ago in the British Museum struck me as
simply the sublimest sight which in this sight-seeing world I had seen.
It was the Memnon's head, then recently brought from Egypt. I looked
at it, as the reader must suppose, in order to understand the depth which
I have here ascribed to the impression, not as a human but as a
symbolic head; and what it symbolized to me were: 1. The peace which
passeth all understanding. 2. The eternity which baffles and confounds
all faculty of computation; the eternity which had been, the eternity
which was to be. 3. The diffusive love, not such as rises and falls upon
waves of life and mortality, not such as sinks and swells by undulations
of time, but a procession--an emanation from some mystery of endless
dawn. You durst not call it a smile that radiated from the lips; the
radiation was too awful to clothe itself in adumbrations or memorials of
flesh.
In that mode of sublimity, perhaps, I still adhere to my first opinion,
that nothing so great was ever beheld. The atmosphere for this, for the
Memnon, was the breathlessness which belongs to a saintly trance; the
holy thing seemed to live by silence. But there is a picture, the pendant
of the Memnon, there is a dreadful cartoon, from the gallery which has

begun to open upon Lord Rosse's telescope, where the appropriate
atmosphere for investing it must be drawn from another silence, from
the frost and from the eternities of death. It is the famous nebula in the
constellation of Orion; famous for the unexampled defiance with which
it resisted all approaches from the most potent of former telescopes;
famous for its frightful magnitude and for the frightful depth to which it
is sunk in the abysses of the heavenly wilderness; famous just now for
the submission with which it has begun to render up its secrets to the
all-conquering telescope; and famous in all time coming for the horror
of the regal phantasma which it has perfected to eyes of flesh. Had
Milton's 'incestuous mother,' with her fleshless son, and with the
warrior angel, his father, that led the rebellions of heaven, been
suddenly unmasked by Lord Rosse's instrument, in these dreadful
distances before which, simply as expressions of resistance, the mind of
man shudders and recoils, there would have been nothing more
appalling in the exposure; in fact, it would have been essentially the
same exposure: the same expression of power in the detestable
phantom, the same rebellion in the attitude, the same pomp of malice in
the features to a universe seasoned for its assaults.
The reader must look to Dr. Nichol's book, at page 51, for the picture of
this abominable apparition. But then, in order to see what I see, the
obedient reader must do what I tell him to do. Let him therefore view
the wretch upside down. If he neglects that simple direction, of course I
don't answer for anything that follows: without any fault of