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Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGS, 18 cents.

"ALL IN A GARDEN FAIR."

ALL in a Garden fair I sate, and spied
The Tulips dancing, dancing side by side,
With scarlet turbans dressed;

All in a Garden green at night I heard
The gladsome voice of night's melodious Bird,
Singing that " Love is best!"

The shy white Jasmine drew aside her veil
Breathing faint fragrance on the loitering gale,
And nodded, nodded, "Yes!

Sweetest of all sweet things is Love! and
wise!

Dance, Tulip! Pipe, fond Bird, thy melodies!

Wake, Rose of loveliness!"'

"Yet," sighed the swaying Cypress, "who
can tell

If Love be wise as sweet? if it be well
For Love to dance and sing?

I see-growing here always- year by year
The Bulbuls die, and on their grassy bier
Rose-petals scattering!

"MY HEART'S DELIGHT."

WHEN all the skies with snow were gray,
And all the earth with snow was white,
I wandered down a still wood way,
And there I met my heart's delight
Slow moving through the silent wood,
The spirit of its solitude:

The brown birds and the lichened tree
Seemed less a part of it than she.

From The Contemporary Review.
A SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY.

ON Tuesday, August 21, 1888, the Union steam-ship Mexican crossed the line outward-bound for the Cape, and a certain proportion of her passengers, amongst whom was the present writer, found themselves for the first time in the southern hemisphere. A few nights later, half an hour's darkness before moonrise gave time for a splendid display of unfamiliar stars. The Southern Cross lay prone towards the west; Alpha and Beta Centauri shone triumphantly above it; Achernar was climbing the sky on the other side of a pole singularly denuded of bright companionship; the lucid streams and knots of the Milky Way were reflected in a pearly shimmer from gently heaving waves, the brilliant effect of the entire sidereal landscape being enhanced by the presence of Jupiter and Mars close to gether in Scorpio, while the dim cone of the Zodiacal Light, tapering upward from the sun's place, faded out above them on the black background of the sky.

The "four stars,"

3

analogues presented by the never setting Magellanic Clouds, with their mixed contents of stars and nebulæ, help further to stimulate.

"What is the Milky Way?" may be called the question of questions for future astronomers; but it has only of late been brought to some extent within the range of available methods. More feasible aims prompted the foundation of southern observatories. English official astronomy in particular took its rise directly from the requirements of English seamen. Flamsteed was commissioned to determine the places of the stars, not because any speculative interest attached to them, but simply in order that they might serve for divisions (as it were) of the great dial-plate of the heavens, upon which the moon marked Greenwich time, and might hence be got to tell the longitude in every part of the world.

But English astronomy was incomplete, even from a strictly utilitarian point of view, so long as it failed to embrace the whole of the celestial sphere; and in proportion as England's colonial empire became consolidated, the need of a supplementary establishment to that at Greenwich was rendered more and more imperative.

Non viste mai fuor ch' alla prima gente, appealed to mediæval imagination as a symbol and a prophecy of the uplifting of the cross in the waste places of the earth. In the choice of its situation, there was Modern travellers regard them from a scarcely room for a doubt. The Cape of more prosaic point of view, and are apt to Good Hope was already distinguished as be "disappointed" at their unequal lustre the scene of Lacaille's labors in 1751-3 ;) and slightly unsymmetrical arrangement. and these furnished the virtual startingThe firmament they help to adorn, how-point of austral astronomy. As their ever, is of a splendor at first sight abso- result, ten thousand southern stars and lutely startling, and at all times peculiarly forty-two nebula were known at the besuggestive. The dullest mind can hardly fail to be roused to wonder by the appearance of the galaxy as it extends past Sirius amidst the grand procession of the stars in Argo, or where the great rift in its structure spans the heavens from the Centaur to the Swan. The intricacy of in other words, was prolate instead of its branches, the curdled texture of its oblate. Its correction or verification was surface, the stupendous collection of dis- hence of extreme interest, and the retant suns, almost palpably rounded out measurement of Lacaille's arc of the mefrom the void of space in Sagittarius; the ridian came to be recognized as a prime abrupt vacuity of the "Coalsack," recall- necessity of geodetic science. By an Oring the dark "lanes" tunnelling certain der in Council, dated October 20, 1820, nebulæ and star-clusters, invite, only to the establishment of a permanent observbaffle, speculations, which the tempting atory at the Cape was accordingly de

ginning of this century; and an indication of a somewhat anomalous character (yet the only one of any kind at hand) had been procured regarding the figure of our globe south of the equator. It seemed to show that the earth bulged the wrong way