"A voice from without," he repeated; "from beyond our realm! Shall the subtle ears of future scientists catch yet lighter echoes? Will the brighter thoughts of more gifted men, under such furtherings as the future may bring, perchance commune with beings who people immensity, distance disappearing before thy ever-reaching spirit? For with thee, who holdest the universe together, space is not space, and there is no word expressing time. Art thou a voice that carriest the history of the past from the past unto and into the present, and for which there is no future, all conditions of time being as one to thee, thy self covering all and connecting all together? Art thou, Gravitation, a voice? If so, there must be a something farther out in those fathomless caverns, beyond mind imaginings, from which thou comest, for how could nothingness have formulated itself into a voice? The suns and universe of suns about us, may be only vacant points in the depths of an all-pervading entity in which even thyself dost exist as a momentary echo, linked to substances ponderous, destined to fade away in the inter-stellar expanse outside, where disturbances disappear, and matter and gravitation together die; where all is pure, quiescent, peaceful and dark. Gravitation, Gravitation, imperishable Gravitation; thou seemingly art the ever-pervading, unalterable, but yet moving spirit of a cosmos of solemn mysteries. Art thou now, in unperceived force expressions, speaking to dumb humanity of other universes; of suns and vortices of suns; bringing tidings from the solar planets, or even infinitely distant star mists, the silent unresolved nebulae, and spreading before earth-bound mortal minds, each instant, fresh tidings from without, that, in ignorance, we can not read? May not beings, perhaps like ourselves but higher in the scale of intelligence, those who people some of the planets about us, even now beckon and try to converse with us through thy subtle, ever-present self? And may not their efforts at communication fail because of our ignorance of a language they can read? Are not light and heat, electricity and magnetism plodding, vacillating agents compared with thy steady existence, and is it even further possible?--"