The consideration of the unfamiliar powers certainly latent in Nature, such as belong to a little tremor of the planet’s surface or such as was shown in that scene I have described, when the comparatively insignificant effect of the few tons of dynamite was to make solid buildings unrealities, which vanished away as quickly as magic-lantern pictures from a screen, may help us to understand that the words of the great poet are but the possible expression of a physical fact, and that “the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples,”--and we with them,--may indeed conceivably some day vanish as the airy nothings at the touch of Prospero’s wand, and without the warning to us of a single instant that the security of our ordinary lives is about to be broken. We concede this, however, in the present case only as an abstract possibility; for the advance of astronomical knowledge is much more likely to show that the kernel of the comet is but of the bigness of some large meteorite, against which our air is an efficient shield, and the chance of evil is in any case most remote,--in any case only such as may come in any hour of our lives from any quarter, not alone from the earthquake or the comet, but from “the pestilence that walketh in darkness;” from the infinitely little below and within us, as well as from the infinite powers of the universe without. VIII. THE STARS. In the South Kensington Museum there is, as everybody knows, an immense collection of objects, appealing to all tastes and all classes, and we find there at the same time people belonging to the wealthy and cultivated part of society lingering over the Louis Seize cabinets or the old majolica, and the artisan and his wife studying the statements as to the relative economy of baking-powders, or admiring Tippoo Saib’s wooden tiger.