That the stars appear like so many diminutive points,
is owing to their immense and inconceivable distance. Immense and
inconceivable indeed it is, since a ball shot from a loaded cannon, and
flying with unabated rapidity, must travel at this impetuous rate almost
700,000 years, before it could reach the nearest of these twinkling
luminaries.
While beholding this vast expanse I learn my own extreme meanness, I
would also discover the abject littleness of all terrestrial things.
What is the earth, with all her ostentatious scenes, compared with this
astonishingly grand furniture of the skies? What, but a dim speck hardly
perceptible in the map of the universe? It is observed by a very
judicious writer, that if the sun himself, which enlightens this part of
the creation, were extinguished, and all the host of planetary worlds
which move about him were annihilated, they would not be missed by an
eye that can take in the whole compass of nature any more than a grain
of sand upon the sea-shore. The bulk of which they consist, and the
space which they occupy, are so exceedingly little in comparison of the
whole, that their loss would leave scarce a blank in the immensity of
God's works. If, then, not our globe only, but this whole system, be so
very dimunitive, what is a kingdom or a country? What are a few
lordships, or the so-much-admired patrimonies of those who are styled
wealthy? When I measure them with my own little pittance, they swell
into proud and bloated dimensions; but when I take the universe for my
standard, how scanty is their size, how contemptible their figure; they
shrink into pompous nothings!
ADDISON.
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