Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers, vol 2 | Page 8

mine, my
description will be unintelligible. This inversion being made, the
following is the dreadful creature that will then reveal itself.
_Description of the Nebula in Orion, as forced to show out by Lord
Rosse._--You see a head thrown back, and raising its face, (or eyes, if
eyes it had,) in the very anguish of hatred, to some unknown heavens.
What should be its skull wears what might be an Assyrian tiara, only
ending behind in a floating train. This head rests upon a beautifully
developed neck and throat. All power being given to the awful enemy,
he is beautiful where he pleases, in order to point and envenom his
ghostly ugliness. The mouth, in that stage of the apocalypse which Sir
John Herschel was able to arrest in his eighteen- inch mirror, is amply
developed. Brutalities unspeakable sit upon the upper lip, which is
confluent with a snout; for separate nostrils there are none. Were it not

for this one defect of nostrils; and, even in spite of this defect, (since, in
so mysterious a mixture of the angelic and the brutal, we may suppose
the sense of odor to work by some compensatory organ,) one is
reminded by the phantom's attitude of a passage, ever memorable, in
Milton: that passage, I mean, where Death first becomes aware, soon
after the original trespass, of his own future empire over man. The
'meagre shadow' even smiles (for the first time and the last) on
apprehending his own abominable bliss, by apprehending from afar the
savor 'of mortal change on earth.'
----'Such a scent,' (he says,) 'I draw Of carnage, prey innumerable.'
As illustrating the attitude of the phantom in Orion, let the reader allow
me to quote the tremendous passage:--
'So saying, with delight he snuff'd the smell Of mortal change on earth.
As when a flock Of ravenous fowl, though many a league remote,
Against the day of battle, to a field, Where armies lie encamp'd, come
flying, lured With scent of living carcasses design'd For death, the
following day, in bloody fight; So scented the grim feature, [Footnote:
'So scented the grim feature,' [feature is the old word for _form or
outline that is shadowy_; and also for form (shadowy or not) which
abstracts from the matter.] By the way, I have never seen it noticed,
that Milton was indebted for the hint of this immortal passage to a
superb line-and-a-half, in Lucan's Pharsalia.] and upturn'd His nostril
wide into the murky air, Sagacious of his quarry from so far.'
But the lower lip, which is drawn inwards with the curve of a conch
shell,--oh what a convolute of cruelty and revenge is there! Cruelty!--to
whom? Revenge!--for what? Ask not, whisper not. Look upwards to
other mysteries. In the very region of his temples, driving itself
downwards into his cruel brain, and breaking the continuity of his
diadem, is a horrid chasm, a ravine, a shaft, that many centuries would
not traverse; and it is serrated on its posterior wall with a harrow that
perhaps is partly hidden. From the anterior wall of this chasm rise, in
vertical directions, two processes; one perpendicular, and rigid as a
horn, the other streaming forward before some portentous breath. What
these could be, seemed doubtful; but now, when further examinations
by Sir John Herschel, at the Cape of Good Hope, have filled up the
scattered outline with a rich umbrageous growth, one is inclined to
regard them as the plumes of a sultan. Dressed he is, therefore, as well

as armed. And finally comes Lord Rosse, that glorifies him with the
jewellery [Footnote: The jewellery of Stars. And one thing is very
remarkable, viz., that not only the stars justify this name of jewellery,
as usual, by the life of their splendor, but also, in this case, by their
arrangement. No jeweller could have set, or disposed with more art, the
magnificent quadrille of stars which is placed immediately below the
upright plume. There is also another, a truncated quadrille, wanting
only the left hand star (or you might call it a bisected lozenge) placed
on the diadem, but obliquely placed as regards the curve of that diadem.
Two or three other arrangements are striking, though not equally so,
both from their regularity and from their repeating each other, as the
forms in a kaleidoscope.] of stars: he is now a vision 'to dream of, not
to tell:' he is ready for the worship of those that are tormented in sleep:
and the stages of his solemn uncovering by astronomy, first by Sir W.
Herschel, secondly, by his son, and finally by Lord Rosse, is like the
reversing of some heavenly doom, like the raising of the seals that had
been sealed by the angel, in the Revelations. But the reader naturally
asks,