conceptions, and our ideas of its Author are enlarged accordingly.





XV

AN ASTRONOMICAL FRIENDSHIP


There are few men with whom I would like so well to have a quiet
talk as with Father Hell. I have known more important and more
interesting men, but none whose acquaintance has afforded me a
serener satisfaction, or imbued me with an ampler measure of a
feeling that I am candid enough to call self-complacency. The ties
that bind us are peculiar. When I call him my friend, I do not
mean that we ever hobnobbed together. But if we are in sympathy,
what matters it that he was dead long before I was born, that he
lived in one century and I in another? Such differences of
generation count for little in the brotherhood of astronomy, the
work of whose members so extends through all time that one might
well forget that he belongs to one century or to another.

Father Hell was an astronomer. Ask not whether he was a very great
one, for in our science we have no infallible gauge by which we
try men and measure their stature. He was a lover of science and
an indefatigable worker, and he did what in him lay to advance our
knowledge of the stars. Let that suffice. I love to fancy that in
some other sphere, either within this universe of ours or outside