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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: time and space; to focus all this about his own momentary
personality; and then, drawing the ground from under his
feet, as if by some cataclysm of nature, to plunge him into
the unfathomable abyss sown with enormous suns and systems,
and among the inconceivable numbers and magnitudes and
velocities of the heavenly bodies. So that he concludes by
striking into us some sense of that disproportion of things
which Shelley has illuminated by the ironical flash of these
eight words: The desire of the moth for the star.
The same truth, but to what a different purpose! Whitman's
moth is mightily at his ease about all the planets in heaven,
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