Urania

“ For the rest, my little book is dedicated to a woman, muse and goddess—the charming enchantress Urania, fit companion of Venus, ranking even above her in the choir of celestial beauties, as purer and more noble, dominating with her clear glance the immensities of [Pg 9] the universe. Urania, be it noted, is feminine, and never would the poetry of the ancients have imagined a masculine symbol to personify the pageant of the heavens. Not Uranus, nor Saturn, nor Jupiter can compare with the ideal beauty of Urania. ”

“ I see here the picture of Urania, which I cannot tell how nor why these men when they fall down, they say is not so fair as yonder gay woman. But pray God I may never see my old mother alive, if I think she be any more matched to Urania, than a goat is to a fine lamb; or than the dog that keeps our flock at home, is like your white greyhound that pulled down the stag last day. ”

“ What is this but expressing surprise that the poets, when they speak of the muses, do not use the dumb language of the painter? In poetry, Urania is the muse of astronomy. Her name and her employment reveal her office. In art she can be recognized only by the wand with which she points to a globe of the heavens. The wand, the globe, and the attitude are the letters with which the artist spells out for us the name Urania. But when the poet wants to say that Urania had long read her death in the stars ”

“ Urania,—the majestic dreaded one, Who wears a glory of Orions twined Around her brow, and who is seen by none Save purest spirits, when, in splendor shrined, She soars above the stars in pride, Ascending to her sunny throne,— Her fiery chaplet lays aside, And now, as beauty, stands alone; While, with the Graces' girdle round her cast, She seems a child, by children understood; For we shall recognize as truth at last, What here as beauty only we have viewed. ”

“ Who is Urania? Why is she represented as the mother of Adonais (Keats) , and the chief mourner for his untimely death?
In mythology the name Urania is assigned to two divinities wholly distinct. The first is one of the nine Muses, the Muse of Astronomy: the second is Aphrodite (Venus) . We may without any hesitation assume that Shelley meant one of these two: but a decision, as to which of the two becomes on reflection by no means so obvious as one might at first suppose. We will first examine the question as to the Muse Urania. ”

“ Urania began to weep.
“Don’t cry!” whispered Cornélie, mercilessly. “For God’s sake don’t start crying. You’ve done the most thoughtless thing imaginable....”
“I know I have!” Urania confessed, nervously, drying her tears.
“Then why did you do it?”
“I couldn’t help it.”
“Alone, with him, in the evening! A man well-known to be a bad lot.” ”

“ Sometimes my friend and companion in studies, Georges Spero, would come and sit beside me; and, inspired by the immortal beauty of Urania, we would let our young and ardent imaginations play over the glories and wonders of the heavens.
"You will be too late for Jupiter," said Le Verrier, entering unexpectedly one evening, and catching me in an attitude of adoration before Urania. "I am afraid you are more of a poet than an astronomer." ”

“ In the freedom of those mornings, when she felt herself released from the old woman—vain, selfish, insignificant, ridiculous—who was as the caricature of her life, she felt that in Urania’s friendship she was finding herself again, she became conscious of being at Nice, she contemplated the garish bustle around her with clearer eyes and she lost the unreality of the first days. At such times it was as though she saw herself again for the first time, in her light serge walking-dress, sitting in the garden, her gloved fingers playing with the tassels of her sunshade. ”

“ He imagines Urania, the heavenly Muse, to reprove him for venturing on sacred ground, and commenting on religious themes; as she would have him confine his steps to his own Parnassus, and there earn the laurel crown. ”

“ The only Muse who has left namesakes is hardly a fair specimen; for Urania (the heavenly) , her epithet, as the presiding genius of astronomers, is itself formed from one of the pristine divinities of Greece, himself probably named from heaven itself, of which he was the personification. Οὐρανός (Ouranos) , Uranus, is in Greek both the sky and the first father of all. ”

“ Urania accompanied her enthusiastically to dressmakers’ establishments and shops and helped her to choose her new outfit. She did not care about it all. She, an elegant woman, a woman of innate elegance, who in her outward appearance had always fought against poverty and who, in the days of her happiness, was able, with the aid of a fresh ribbon, to wear an old blouse gracefully, was utterly indifferent to everything that she was now buying on Mrs. Uxeley’s account. ”

“ You have felt the infinity of space, you have understood the grandeur of the universe. Now your celestial journey is over. We must go back to the earth and your own home again.
"For yourself," she added, "know that study is the one source of any intellectual value; be neither rich nor poor; keep yourself from all ambition as well as from all servitude; be independent,—independence is the rarest gift and the first condition of happiness."
Urania was still speaking in her gentle voice ”

“ Her name—her American name of Urania—had a first-rate sound: “the Princess Urania” sounded [187] unexpectedly well. But the little young wife, a trifle pale, a trifle sad, with her clipping American accent, suddenly struck Cornélie as somewhat out of place amid the faded glories of San Stefano. Cornélie was continually forgetting that Urania was Princess di Forte-Braccio: she always thought of her as Miss Hope. And yet Urania possessed great tact, great ease of manner, a great power of assimilation. Gilio had entered ”

“ Urania, the muse of astronomy, was a woman; and, although most of her devotees have been men, the number of the gentler sex who have achieved success in the cultivation of the science of the stars has been much larger than is usually supposed. ”

“ She made new acquaintances by the score and forgot them again at once and no longer remembered, when she saw them again, whether she knew them or not. As a rule people were fairly pleasant to her in that cosmopolitan set, because they knew that she was an intimate friend of the Princess Urania’s. But, like Urania herself, she was sometimes conscious, from the feminine bearers of the old Italian names and titles which sometimes glittered in that set, of an overwhelming pride and contempt. The men always asked to be introduced to her ”

“ Although feeling as if I were motionless, I had the same sensation which one experiences on rising in a balloon and seeing the earth descend. I went up, up, in a magic flight toward the inaccessible zenith. Urania was with me, a little higher up, looking at me kindly and pointing out the kingdoms below. Day had come again. I recognized France, the Rhine, Germany, Austria, Italy, the Mediterranean, Spain, the Atlantic Ocean, the Channel, [19] England. But all this liliputian geography soon shrank away. Speedily the terrestrial globe was reduced to the dimensions of the moon in its last quarter ”

“ No man has altered these pure records of divinity; no finger has interpolated one single line. They are as beautifully clear to the soul now as they were in the very dawn of Nature's awful creation.
To the Initiate into Urania's mysteries it is unnecessary to draw a parallel between the constellation and its astrological sign. They are too clear, magnificent and impressive to escape notice. To the majority of students the resembance may not be so apparent, hence, for their benefit, we will point out a few aspects of this interesting parallel. ”

“ And for Urania this contempt was more difficult to put up with than for herself. For she accepted her rôle as the companion. She always [246] kept an eye on Mrs. Uxeley, constantly joined her for a minute in the course of the evening, fetched a fan which Mrs. Uxeley had left in the next room or did her this or that trifling service. Then she would sit down, against the wall alone in the busily humming drawing-room, and gaze indifferently before her. She sat, always very smartly dressed, in an attitude of graceful indifference and weary boredom, tapping her little foot or unfolding her fan. ”

“ Those cannot remain imprisoned on the Earth, and their destiny is to live the Uranian life.
The Uranian soul, even during its terrestrial incarnations, lives in the world of the absolute and divine. It knows that, though dwelling on the Earth, it is really in heaven, and that our planet is a star of heaven.
What is the inner nature of the soul? What are its ways of manifestation? When does its memory become permanent, and maintain with certainty a conscious identity? Under what [205] variety of forms and substances can it live? What extent of space can it overcome? ”

“ Urania, with her eyes lifted to the starry heavens, tried to draw man’s attention to the well-regulated courses of the heavenly bodies,166 proclaiming in eternal silence with fiery tongues the glories of the universe. Kalliope finally taught man to record heroic deeds in epic poetry. ”

“ As I was wondering at this marvellous spectacle Urania told me this was their usual mode of interment and resurrection. Yes, on this world human beings enjoyed the organic faculty of those insects which have the gift of going to sleep in a chrysalis state, and metamorphosing themselves into winged butterflies. It is like a double human race; and the beings in the first phase, even the coarsest and most material of them, need but to die to rise again in the most splendid of transformations. ”

“ It was true, as the gypsy girl said, the men taken into custody were the men she had seen enter the cave, and those who were seen later in the swamp were members of the same gang, but were strangers to the cave and the hidden property. Just how Urania came into possession of the facts was not altogether plain, but likely her habit of sleeping under trees, at some distance from the tents, made it possible for her to hear queer conversations, when all in the dense wood was supposed to be wrapt in the mantle of night. ”

“ The lowest animal on Mars is better, finer, gentler, more intelligent, and greater than the god of the armies of David, Constantine, Charlemagne, and all your crowned assassins. There is therefore nothing surprising in the coarseness and stupidity of terrestrial humanity. But the law of progress governs the world. You are more advanced than at the period of your ancestors of the stone age, whose wretched existence [254] was spent in fighting night and day with ferocious beasts. In a few thousands of years you will be more advanced than you are now. Then Urania will reign in your hearts. ”

“ For, one must remember that the Uranian passion is informed much by a sort of idealism, far more vivid and nervous than the sensation of normalists. The Uranian's instinct demands less of the actual physique. Usual as are buccal onanism, mutual masturbation and so on, they are not invariably instinctive to Uranian. In his more refined class he is intensely sensitive to a spiritual possession of his friend, his psychic conquest of the beauty of the male. Imagination has a powerful share in even the physical pleasure of all superior similisexualism. ”

“ But the military profession is really one that is highly aesthetic and nervous, as well as one that throws the Uranian into intimate, exclusive, and admiring relations with men. It fosters philarrenism, frequently dignifying it. Aesthetics are to the Uranian the breath of life. No wonder that we find him as authour, painter, sculptor, composer, singer, actor; whatever demands nerves and concentrated idealism, pouring forth his genius from one epoch of the world to the next. Genius and madness are old allies. We need not be surprised to find that the Uranian often confirms that painful mystery. ”

“ He can be the object of sympathy to even the outside world; for his secret can be guessed by it without disgrace on any ground of "unnatural" emotion. But the Uranian must often "go through" the most overwhelming, soul-prostrating of loves, finding his nerves and mind and body beaten down under the passion, his days and nights vivified or poisoned by it, all without his doing anything so persistently as to hide his sentiment forever from the object of it! ”

“ That the Uranians do stand out as helpers and guides, not only in matters of Education, but in affairs of love and marriage, is tolerably patent to all who know them. It is a common experience122 for them to be consulted now by the man, now by the woman, whose matrimonial conditions are uncongenial or disastrous—not generally because the consultants in the least perceive the Uranian nature, but because they instinctively feel that here is a strong sympathy with and understanding of their side of the question. ”

“ Miserable indeed is the Uranian then, unless he can rise to a less sexual plane of sentiment. He is abandoned, his dream is over! He cannot blame anyone. He can, he should, simply submit. But what shall console him? How can he surrender the man he loves, even when it is for the other's happiness? In a later chapter, "The Uranian in Relation to Marriage", one or two instances of this struggle are given. ”

“ So come to the higher Uranian, and so stays, at least faith in himself and his existence, and a respect for it. Often he can live a troubled life through, and can die, with a conviction that he—or his betters in the same intersexual fellowship—are born and live nearer to the Heart of Existence, are placed for their happiness or unhappiness higher on the mystic ladder of Life, than is even the finest-natured and loftiest-lived Dionian. ”