Excerpt from The Country And so with space. Formerly no one had any idea that the stars were a certain number of million miles away. They entered into human life they were beautiful and useful, and mythology made them more human but not less god-like. Now they are inferior to gas and electric light. Our way of human iziu g them is to say that the railway metals of Great Britain, if placed on end, would reach to the moon, or would do so if they were a little longer. We gape and gasp, and the railway is not any more divine or the moon any more human. The sky is now a very large dome pricked through by a number of lights so small as to be practically useless, and if we catch ourselves sighing at them the sigh is deepened by the thought that we are still suffering from a discredited but not extinct superstition. That the uni verse has been enlarged is somehow supposed to be not incompatible with the fact that the telegraph, etc., have annihilated space. 32 The peasant who saw his lord ride home 86 withwith apes and ivory and peacocks had the means for as sublime a View of the glories of the world as the schoolboy who could tell you the diameter of the earth. How long will it take the truths of Science to pass out of the stage of facts and figures into realities or living falsehoods The poet Francis Thompson is one of the few who have even pretended to possess such realities. He speaks of the Earth, a joyous David, ' dancing before God, and of a mighty Spirit unknown that swingeth the slow earth before the embannered Throne.' But this is not the living reality or falsehood of imagination it is the shadowy half-truth of fancy. Poets who believed the earth and man to be two or three thousand years old had not less regard for the dark backward and abysm of time than poets who are geologists. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.