One evening--the evening on which I discovered how the light could change her face--I found the library-door wide open. A lamp stood on the chimney-piece shedding its rays over the Muse in one of her most bewitching aspects. The slanting light lovingly caressed the brow, cheeks, lips, and throat. Her expression was wonderful. I went in, and for a while stood there in motionless contemplation. Then I tried changing the position of the lamp, making the light play over the shoulders, arms, neck, and hair. The statue seemed to live, to think, to awake, and smile again! Odd, whimsical idea; strange feeling! I had actually fallen in love! I had changed from admirer to lover! If I had been told then that what I felt was not real love, and that this platonism was but a childish dream, I should have been very incredulous. The director came in, but did not seem so much surprised at my presence as I might have feared. (The study was often used to reach the observation rooms.) "You are late for Jupiter," he said, as I replaced the lamp on the chimney-piece; and when I reached the threshold he added, "Can it be possible that you are a poet?" lengthening out the last syllable as though he had said "poët." I might have answered him by quoting Kepler, Galileo, D'Alembert, the two Herschels, and other famous savants who were poets and astronomers at the same time. I could have reminded him that the first director of this very observatory, Jean-Dominique Cassini, sang of Urania in Latin, French, and Italian verse. But the observatory pupils were not in the habit of answering the senator-director in any way whatever; senators were personages of importance in those days, and the directorship of the observatory was a life-office. Then too the great geometrician would have looked upon the most wonderful poem by Dante, Ariosto, or Hugo with the same profound disdain that a big Newfoundland dog would show if one should put a glass of wine to his mouth. Besides, I was clearly in the wrong. How that charming figure of Urania haunted me, with all the delicious changes of expression! Her smile was so gracious, and sometimes her bronze eyes had such a real look. She lacked nothing but speech. That night, just as I fell asleep, I saw the divine goddess again; and this time she spoke. Oh, she was really living now! And what a pretty mouth! I could have kissed each word. "Come," she said, "come up into the sky. Far away from the earth, you shall look down upon this lower world, you shall contemplate the great universe in its grandeur. Come and see." [Illustration] [Illustration] II. UNKNOWN HUMANITIES.