And now for a great marvel. Let the eye range slowly from Eta (η) directly toward Zeta (ζ). When one-third of the distance between the two stars has been passed, a faint, glimmering speck will be perceived. Perhaps you will need an opera-glass to make sure that you see it. This is the “Great Cluster in Hercules.” You must go to the southern hemisphere to find its match anywhere in the sky. It is a ball of suns! Now you need a telescope. You _must have one_. You must either buy or borrow it, or you must pay a visit to an observatory, for this is a thing that no intelligent human being in these days can afford not to see. Can it be possible that any man can know that fifteen thousand suns are to be seen, burning in a compact globular cluster, and not long to regard them with his own eyes? Of what use is description in such a case? The language has not yet been invented to depict such things. Human speech comes down to us from the times when men did not need the tongue of the gods to tell what they saw. When Galileo invented the telescope, and Herschel multiplied its powers a thousandfold, they should have found a language fitted to describe their discoveries. But if you cannot get a look at the Hercules cluster through a powerful telescope, photography comes to your aid. Look at one of the wonderful Lick or Yerkes photographs of it, and pause long on what you see. Note the crowding of those suns toward the centre, note the glittering spiral lines formed by those which seem streaming and hurrying from all sides to join the marvellous congregation--and then turn again to that faint speck in the sky, which is all that the naked eye reveals of the wonder, and reflect upon the meaning of space and the universe. We now turn farther east, still keeping the eyes directed high in the sky, and just at the edge of the Milky Way, with two minute stars making a little triangle with it, we see Vega or Alpha Lyræ, the astonishing brilliant that flashes on the strings of the heavenly Lyre. At the Vernal Equinox it was just rising far over in the northeast; now it is the unquestioned queen of that quarter of the sky. I like to think of Emerson when looking at that star. There is a sentence of his which reflects it like a mirror. When he strove to rouse the “sluggard intellect of this continent,” to “look from under its iron lids,” he could find no stronger image than that of poetry reviving here and leading in a new age, “as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the Pole-star for a thousand years.”