“’The firmament-arch has no key-stone; least of all, is man its prop.  He stands alone.  We are every thing to ourselves, but how little to others.  What are others to us?  Assure life everlasting to this generation, and their immediate forefathers—­and what tears would flow, were there no resurrection for the countless generations from the first man to five cycles since?  And soon we ourselves shall have fallen in with the rank and file of our sires.  At a blow, annihilate some distant tribe, now alive and jocund—­and what would we reck?  Curiosity apart, do we really care whether the people in Bellatrix are immortal or no?

“’Though they smite us, let us not turn away from these things, if they be really thus.

“’There was a time, when near Cassiopeia, a star of the first magnitude, most lustrous in the North, grew lurid as a fire, then dim as ashes, and went out.  Now, its place is a blank.  A vast world, with all its continents, say the astronomers, blazing over the heads of our fathers; while in Mardi were merry-makings, and maidens given in marriage.  Who now thinks of that burning sphere?  How few are aware that ever it was?

“’These things are so.

“’Fellow-men! we must go, and obtain a glimpse of what we are from the Belts of Jupiter and the Moons of Saturn, ere we see ourselves aright.  The universe can wax old without us; though by Oro’s grace we may live to behold a wrinkle in the sky.  Eternity is not ours by right; and, alone, unrequited sufferings here, form no title thereto, unless resurrections are reserved for maltreated brutes.  Suffering is suffering; be the sufferer man, brute, or thing.

“’How small;—­how nothing, our deserts!  Let us stifle all vain speculations; we need not to be told what righteousness is; we were born with the whole Law in our hearts.  Let us do:  let us act:  let us down on our knees.  And if, after all, we should be no more forever;—­ far better to perish meriting immortality, than to enjoy it unmeritorious.  While we fight over creeds, ten thousand fingers point to where vital good may be done.  All round us, Want crawls to her lairs; and, shivering, dies unrelieved.  Here, here, fellow-men, we can better minister as angels, than in heaven, where want and misery come not.

“’We Mardians talk as though the future was all in all; but act as though the present was every thing.  Yet so far as, in our theories, we dwarf our Mardi; we go not beyond an archangel’s apprehension of it, who takes in all suns and systems at a glance.  Like pebbles, were the isles to sink in space, Sirius, the Dog-star, would still flame in the sky.  But as the atom to the animalculae, so Mardi to us.  And lived aright, these mortal lives are long; looked into, these souls, fathomless as the nethermost depths.