(_And he beholds the moon,--like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light._)
THE DEVIL. "Formerly it was the sojourn of souls! Even the good Pythagoras adorned it with magnificent flowers, populated it with birds!"
ANTHONY. "I can see only desolate plains there, with extinct craters yawning under a black sky!
"Let us go towards those milder-beaming stars, that we may contemplate the angels who uphold them at arms' length, like torches!"
THE DEVIL (_bears him into the midst of the stars_):
"They attract at the same time that they repel each other. The action of each one results from that of others, and contributes thereunto,--without the aid of any auxiliary, by the force of a law, the virtue of order alone!"
ANTHONY. "Yes!...yes! My intelligence grasps the great truth! It is a joy greater than all tender pleasures! Breathless I find myself with astonishment at the enormity of God!"
THE DEVIL. "Even as the firmament ever rises as thou dost ascend, so with the expansion of thy thought will He become greater to thee; and after this discovery of the universe thou wilt feel thy joy augment with the broadening and deepening of the infinite."
ANTHONY. "Ah! higher!--higher still!--- forever higher!"
(_Then the stars multiply, scintillate. The Milky Way develops in the zenith like a monstrous belt, with holes at intervals; through these rents in its brightness stretches of prolonged darkness are visible. There are rains of stars, long trains of golden dust, luminous vapours that float and dissolve.
At times a comet suddenly passes by; then the tranquillity of innumerable lights recommences.
Anthony, with outstretched arms, supports himself upon the Devil's horns, and thus occupies all the space between them.
He remembers with disdain the ignorance of other days, the mediocrity of his dreams. And now those luminous globes he was wont to gaze upon from below, are close to him. He distinguishes the intercrossing of the lines of their orbits, the complexity of their courses. He beholds them coming from afar,--and, like stones suspended in a sling, describe their circles, form their hyperbolas.
He perceives, all within the field of his vision at once, the Southern Cross and the Great Bear, the Lynx and the Centaur, the nebula of Dorado, the six suns in the constellation of Orion, Jupiter with his four satellites, and the triple ring of the monstrous Saturn!--all the planets, all the stars that men will discover in the future. He fills his eyes with their light; he over-burthens his mind with calculation of their distances: then, bowing his head, he murmurs_):