Look at it again from another aspect. Every colour of the rainbow
is found in the stars. Emerald, azure, ruby, gold, lilac, topaz,
fawn--they shine with wonderful and mysterious beauty. But,
whether these more delicate shades be really in the stars or no,
three colours are certainly found in them. The stars sink from
bluish white to yellow, and on to deep red. The immortal fires of
the Greeks are dying. Piercing the depths with a dull red glow,
here and there, are the dying suns; and if you look closely you
will see, flitting like ghosts across the light of their luminous
neighbours, the gaunt frames of dead worlds. Here and there are
vast stretches of loose cosmic dust that seems to be gathering
into embryonic stars; here and there are stars in infancy or in
strenuous youth. You detect all the chief phases of the making of
a world in the forms and fires of these colossal aggregations of
matter. Like the chance crowd on which you may look down in the
square of a great city, they range from the infant to the worn
and sinking aged. There is this difference, however, that the
embryos of worlds sprawl, gigantic and luminous, across the
expanse; that the dark and mighty bodies of the dead rush, like
the rest, at twenty or fifty miles a second; and that at
intervals some appalling blaze, that dims even the fearful
furnaces of the living, seems to announce the resurrection of the
dead.
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