Look at Capella, how gently and steadily she shines! You see Capella, not as she is _now_, but as she _was_ thirty years ago. Capella may have ceased to exist meantime. The fires of that mighty sun may have gone out. If so, we shall by and by learn the fact--more than thirty years after it happened. Look at the Pole-star. Is there any Pole-star now? I can not tell you. I only know there _was_ one, forty years ago, when that ray of light started on its long journey. Stars have ceased to shine before now. What may have happened in those forty years, who can say? Look at that dim star, shining through a powerful telescope with faint and glimmering light. We are told that in all probability the tiny ray left its home long before the time of Adam. There is a strange solemnity in the thought. Hundreds of years ago--thousands of years ago--some say, even tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago! It carries us out of the little present into the unknown ages of a past eternity. If the neighboring stars are placed at tens and hundreds of trillions of miles from us, it is at quadrillions, at quintillions of miles that most of the stars lie which are visible in the sky in telescopic fields. What suns! what splendors! Their light comes from such distances! And it is these distant suns which human pride would like to make revolve round our atom; and it was for our eyes that ancient theology declared these lights, invisible without a telescope, were created! No contemplation expands the thought, elevates the mind, and spreads the wings of the soul like that of the sidereal immensities illuminated by the suns of infinitude. We are already learning that there is in the stellar world a diversity no less great than that which we noticed in the planetary world. As in our own Solar System the globes already studied range from 6 miles in diameter (satellites of Mars) up to 88,000 miles (Jupiter)--that is to say, in the proportion of 1 to 14,000--so in the sidereal system the suns present the most enormous differences of volume and brightness: 61 Cygni, the stars numbered 2,398 in the catalogue of Lalande, and 9,352 in the catalogue of Lacaille, and others of the eighth or ninth magnitude, are incomparably smaller or less luminous than Sirius, Arcturus, Capella, Canopus, Rigel, and the other brilliants of the firmament. CHAPTER X. OUR NEIGHBORS’ MOVEMENTS. How high! how distant! how mighty! How little we know about them, yet how overwhelming the little we know, and how wonderful that we do know it! We have now to consider the movements of these distant neighbors--first, their seeming movements; secondly, their real movements.