ple in the Scriptures. Think of Keats writ- | watched by his bedside constantly. Bying such a poem as the elegant and virtuous and-by, so wearied became the sick man of Mr. Addison's Spacious Firmament on his thoughts, so fretted and tortured, that High"! He loved the world with an aching he began to long for a release. Severn intense affection. He sent his soul back to the old Greek days and etherealized its clumsy decorations of woods and streams into creatures of air and light and sunshine, who symbolized nature fittingly. Yet Keats cannot be accused of paganism. There was that in his blood, indeed, which he could not help, but he had not the heartlessness or the drear fatalism of a pagan. All this tended to tie him to the ground, and there is no doubt he felt a bitter anguish when he knew that his life was to be contracted far within the common limits. The following passage of his biography shows how he took writes, "He talks of the quiet grave as the first rest he can ever have." He gave the line for his epitaph so well known, and he waited with great calmness now for the end. It came at last. "On the twenty-third, about four, the approaches of death came on: 'Severn - I-lift me up - I am dying; I shall die easy. Don't be frightened - be firm, and thank God it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sunk into death, so quiet that I still thought he slept." Keats was buried in Rome, his grave surrounded with flowers, of which he had told Severn when dying he thought "the intensest pleasure he had received in life was in watching the growth of flowers." To him Shelley raised the glorious gl monument told his friend he had been outside the stage of "Adonais," and, in a few years, next to coach, had received a severe chill, was a little the resting place of Keats was placed a fevered, but added, 'I don't feel it now.' He tombstone inscribed with the name of Shelwas easily persuaded to go to bed, and as he ley. It is gratifying to think that the fame leaped into the cold sheets, before his head was of both has now increased, and that their on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and said, works have left an enduring and wholesome the first summons: "One night, about eleven o'clock, Keats returned home in a state of strange physical excitement; it might have appeared to those who did not know him one of fierce intoxication. He That is blood from my mouth; bring me the candle - let me see this blood.' He gazed steadfastly for some moments at the ruddy stain, and then looking in his friend's face, with an ex pression of sudden calmness never to be forgot ten, said, 'I know the colour of that blood - it is arterial blood I cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop is my death-warrant. I must die.'" impress upon literature. They were eminently discoverers of poetry, as fearless and as self-sacrificing in their searches as the men who have braved the deserts of Africa and Australia. Their intellectual courage was their special characteristic. We may regret that Keats was not of stouter fibre; we may deplore his fragile nature, but he has left the world in his debt, and it was not an over-kind world to him. He has supplied to English poetry - with others of his school-what it very much required, an element of pure æsthetic beauty as apart from the beauty of sheer power and loftiness, or the beauty of proportion. Keats gave his readers the essence of poetry, and many of our modern writers have not failed to discover the value of this essence when diluted. He would have been more popu Although he recovered this attack, and many others, he never forgot the incident, and always looked upon it as an unmistakable warning. Nevertheless it did not materially impair his spirits, which were at times of a hectic brightness. He was advised to go to Italy, and not before it was time. In his journey he suffered severely. The poor fellow wrote the following from Naples; one almost shrinks from extracting it so full is it of pain and solitariness: lar, perhaps, had he mingled his rare ex .. " I can bear to die - I cannot bear to leave her. Oh, God! God! God! My imagination is horribly vivid about her - I see her - I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her for a moment. cellence with coarser materials, - had he tickled, in fact, those instincts and sentiments which Byron was never, above appealing to. But he was ever faithful to art, and he has compassed at least in part the Oh, that I glorious designs which he so desired to could be buried near where she lives. manifest: "He has outsoared the shadow of our night, No. 1274.-October 31, 1868. 1. ONE HUNDRED PLANETS, CONTENTS. 2. THE APOLLO BELVEDERE IN A NEW LIGHT. Trans lated for the Living Age,. St. James' Magazine, Bremen Weser Zeitung, 3. MADAME DE KRUDENER,. 4. NOTES FROM THE SCOTTISH ISLES. No. III. Canna 5. DOLLS, : . Spectator, ["Is there a heart that never loved?" Many centuries have rolled over us - we 7. HAWTHORNE, AND THE NORTH BRITISH REVIEW, 259 265 269 283 286 12. THE DEAN OF CORK AT THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, Spectator, 13. POEMS BY LOYALISTS AND ROYALISTS, 16. ENGLAND ON DUTIES OF NEUTRALS, THE SHIP AT SEA,. 310 Spectator, 313 London Review,. 315 Economist, 318 MR. DICKENS AND ALL THE YEAR ROUND, 304 THE ROCK AHEAD,. In No. 1275 we shall begin two good stories, to be afterward published separately: 1. MADAME THERESE. By ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN - (two celebrated French authors.) This has been translated for the "Living Age," and will continue every week till concluded. 2. LETTICE LISLE; which is probably by Miss Thackeray. NEW BOOKS: RECOLLECTIONS OF A BUSY LIFE. By Horace Greeley. New York: T. B. Ford & Co. Boston: H. A. Brown & Co. [We shall find opportunities to make this record of a remarkable man well known to our read ers. Mr. Greeley has been an important part of the late years of the Republic.] THE TROTTING HORSE OF AMERICA. How to train and drive him. With Reminiscences. By Hiram Woodruff. Edited by Charles J. Foster, etc., etc. New York: T. B. Ford & Co. Boston: H. A. Brown & Co. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money. From The New Monthly Magazine. THE SHIP AT SEA. BY NICHOLAS MICHELL. I. A SHIP at sea, no land to cheer the eye, Nothing but waves below, and skies o'erhead, Soon upon deck the late dull sleepers come, Nothing to break that blue monotony, The round world seeming one vast ocean-bed; The unfathomed deep now peaceful, now at strife, Heaving forever like a thing of life; Forever rolling on as at its birth, Belting with solemn glory all the earth. From St. James' Magazine. ONE HUNDRED PLANETS. It is probable that before these pages appear, the number of known asteroids, or minor planets, will be increased to one hundred. As we write, two are wanting from monies in the music of the spheres. He quickly noticed a certain evidence of law in the distribution of the planets at various distances from the great centre of the system. He tried many methods - some simple, others complex - for harmonising the that number; but scarcely a month has planetary distances, but he was always passed lately without adding one of these foiled at one particular point of his inquiry. minute worlds to the planetary system. It A gap, which his devices were insufficient would almost seem as if astronomers had to bridge over, appeared to exist between been more than usually on the alert of late, the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. on account of the near prospect of entering length," says he, "I have become bolder, on the second hundred of the asteroidal and I now place a new planet between these that its distance corresponds very closely which had moved away to other regions of to Bode's law. As Uranus travels outside the sky, we shall probably never learn. Saturn's orbit, its distance from Mercury's Certain it is that Piazzi could not detect orbit should be represented by sixty-four any star where Wollaston had marked one (on the above-named scale). The actual in. But his search was soon rewarded by distance is sixty-two and two-thirds. This a discovery of greater value. On the 1st close agreement attracted much attention of January, 1801, he observed a small star, to Bode's law, and many eminent astrono- which was not recorded in his own, or any mers began to attach considerable impor- other catalogue. On the 2nd he looked tance to Kepler's prediction, that between again for the star, proposing to determine the orbit of Mars and Jupiter there would its place afresh. To his surprise, he found be found a planet too small to be seen by that the star had moved away from the placethe unaided eye. it had before occupied. The motion was Nearly nineteen years elapsed, however, inconsiderable, indeed, but yet he could before any measures were taken to institute feel little doubt respecting its reality. On a rigid search for the missing body. At the 3rd he looked again for the stranger, length, in 1800, six distinguished astrono- and now there was absolute certainty remers held a meeting at Lilienthal, at which specting its motion. Yes, the star was the subject was earnestly discussed. It slowly moving from east to west, or, to use was finally arranged that the zodiac that a technical expression, slowly retrograding. family. The history of the discovery that there exists in space a zone of worlds circling round the sun in interwoven orbits, is one which can hardly fail to be interesting, even to those who have not made astronomy a subject of special study. By a singular accident, this history belongs wholly to the nineteenth century, the discovery of the first asteroid having been effected on the first day of the century. We propose to discuss some of the more interesting circumstances which have attended the search after new members of the zone of asteroids. When Copernicus had shown that the planets circle around the sun, and had thus swept away the whole of Ptolemy's complicated system, with its "Centrics and eccentrics scribbled o'er, astronomers began for the first time to be sensible of the symmetry and orderliness of the planetary system. They saw six beautiful orbs all circling in one direction around a massive central globe; and around one of these orbs our own earth they saw a secondary orb, or satellite, revolving in the same direction as the primary planets. Then came the discovery of Jupiter's moons, revolving in symmetrical orbits around the giant of the solar system, and still astronomers saw no change from the law by which all the members of the solar system, satellites as well as primaries, seemed bound to revolve in one direction. Struck by the order and symmetry thus exhibited within the solar system, the ingenious astronomer Kepler was led to seek for new evidence of symmetrical arrangement, or, as he quaintly expressed it, for new har "At two "- a happy anticipation of future discoveries, somewhat marred, it should seem, by a guess which has not been confirmed the supposition, namely, that an unseen planet revolves between the orbits of Mercury and Venus. A century and a half later, Professor Titius, of Wittemberg, propounded a singular law of planetary distances, which only required for its completeness the supposition that an unseen planet revolves between Mars and Jupiter. This law, commonly called Bode's law, is usually presented with an array of figures, which leads the beginner to suppose that the law is a complex one. In reality, however, the law is very simple, and may be expressed in few words, thus: the distances of the successive planets from the orbit of Mercury increases in a twofold proportion. The law is not fulfilled exactly, but there is an approximation to exactness which is sufficiently remarkable. Thus, according to the law, if we called the distance of the earth from Mercury's orbit two, the distance of Venus should be one, that of Mars four, that of the missing planet eight, that of Jupiter sixteen, and that of Saturn thirty-two. The actual distances are as follows: - That of Venus is one and a tenth, that of Mars three and four-fifths, that of Jupiter sixteen, and that of Saturn thirty and a half. Although we recognize the possibility that this approximation may be merely accidental, yet it cannot fail to strike us as involving, at the least, a very singular coincidence. Here matters remained until the discovery of Uranus by Sir William (then Dr.) Herschel. As soon as the orbit of the new planet had been determined, it was found region of the celestial sphere along which all the planets are observed to move should be divided into twenty-four belts, which were to be explored by as many astronomers, each astronomer taking a separate zone. The superintendence of the whole process was assigned to the eminent observer Schroeter; and Baron de Lach, to whom the institution of the search was mainly due, was chosen as the president of the new Society of Planet-seekers. This was precisely the sort of motion which would be exhibited by a planet occupying the apparent position of the stranger. But as it was a kind of motion which might belong to a body moving in a very different manner, Piazzi waited for further information. If the stranger were really a planet, it could not retrograde long, but was bound presently to resume its forward motion. Why this is so, we need not here stop to explain. Let it suffice to remark that, along certain parts of their paths, the planets seem for awhile to move backwards, just as an advancing train might seem to It has often happened in the history of astronomy that the results of the most carefully organized research have been anticipated by observers not engaged in carrying do if observed by a passenger in a train out the appointed plan of operations. For travelling more rapidly in the same direcinstance, when all the astronomers of Eu- tion. For eleven days Piazzi's star continrope were sweeping the heavens for Halley's comet in 1758, a Saxon farmer - Palisch anticipated them all by detecting - and that with the unaided eye - the return of the wanderer. Something similar frappened in the present instance. The celebrated Italian astronomer Piazzi was engaged in constructing an extensive catalogue of the fixed stars. While prosecuting this work, he was led to examine a ued to retrograde, but he observed with satisfaction that its motion diminished daily. On the 12th of January it was stationary. Then slowly it began to advance along the zodiac signs. There was no longer any doubt respecting the character of the stranger; and after watching the star for twelve more days, Piazzi wrote to Bode and Orani, two members of the planet-seeking association, in portion of the constellation Taurus, in which forming them of the nature of his discovery. Unfortunately his letters did not reach them until the end of March, and in the meantime-after tracking the star until the 11th of February - Piazzi was seized with a a certain star (assigned by Wollaston to this region) was missing. For several nights in succession Piazzi prosecuted his inquiry after the missing orb. Whether Wollaston had made a mistake, or whether very dangerous illness which put a stop to he had recorded the place of an asteroid his observations. When Bode and Orani |