Watchers of the Sky

Alfred Noyes

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  • PREFATORY NOTE
  • PROLOGUE
  • I. COPERNICUS
  • II. TYCHO BRAKE
  • III. KEPLER
  • IV. GALILEO
  • V. NEWTON
  • VI. WILLIAM HERSCHEL CONDUCTS
  • VII. SIR JOHN HERSCHEL REMEMBERS
  • EPILOGUE
  • Produced by Beth L. Constantine, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
    and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.




    THE TORCH-BEARERS



    WATCHERS OF THE SKY





    BY


    ALFRED NOYES






    PREFATORY NOTE




    This volume, while it is complete in itself, is also the first of a
    trilogy, the scope of which is suggested in the prologue. The story of
    scientific discovery has its own epic unity—a unity of purpose and
    endeavour—the single torch passing from hand to hand through the
    centuries; and the great moments of science when, after long labour,
    the pioneers saw their accumulated facts falling into a significant
    order—sometimes in the form of a law that revolutionised the whole
    world of thought—have an intense human interest, and belong
    essentially to the creative imagination of poetry. It is with these
    moments that my poem is chiefly concerned, not with any impossible
    attempt to cover the whole field or to make a new poetic system, after
    the Lucretian model, out of modern science.


    The theme has been in my mind for a good many years; and the first
    volume, dealing with the “Watchers of the Sky,” began to take definite
    shape during what was to me an unforgettable experience—the night I
    was privileged to spend on a summit of the Sierra Madre Mountains,
    when the first trial was made of the new 100-inch telescope. The
    prologue to this volume attempts to give a picture of that night, and
    to elucidate my own purpose.


    The first tale in this volume plunges into the middle of things, with
    the revolution brought about by Copernicus; but, within the tale,
    partly by means of an incidental lyric, there is an attempt to give a
    bird's-eye view of what had gone before. The torch then passes to
    Tycho Brahe, who, driven into exile with his tables of the stars, at
    the very point of death hands them over to a young man named Kepler.
    Kepler, with their help, arrives at his own great laws, and
    corresponds with Galileo—the intensely human drama of whose life I
    have endeavoured to depict with more historical accuracy than can be
    attributed to much of the poetic literature that has gathered around
    his name. Too many writers have succumbed to the temptation of the
    cry, “e pur si muove!” It is, of course, rejected by every reliable
    historian, and was first attributed to Galileo a hundred years after
    his death. M. Ponsard, in his play on the subject, succumbed to the
    extent of making his final scene end with Galileo “frappant du pied la
    terre,” and crying, “pourtant elle tourne.” Galileo's recantation was
    a far more subtle and tragically complicated affair than that. Even
    Landor succumbed to the easy method of making him display his entirely
    legendary scars to Milton. If these familiar pictures are not to be
    found in my poem, it may be well for me to assure the hasty reader
    that it is because I have endeavoured to present a more just picture.
    I have tried to suggest the complications of motive in this section by
    a series of letters passing between the characters chiefly concerned.
    There was, of course, a certain poetic significance in the legend of
    “e pur si muove”; and this significance I have endeavoured to retain
    without violating historical truth.


    In the year of Galileo's death Newton was born, and the subsequent
    sections carry the story on to the modern observatory again. The form
    I have adopted is a development from that of an earlier book,
    Tales of the Mermaid Tavern” where certain poets and
    discoverers of another kind were brought together round a central
    idea, and their stories told in a combination of narrative and lyrical
    verse. “The Torch-Bearers” flowed all the more naturally into a
    similar form in view of the fact that Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and many
    other pioneers of science wrote a considerable number of poems.
    Those imbedded in the works of Kepler—whose blazing and fantastic
    genius was, indeed, primarily poetic—are of extraordinary interest. I
    was helped, too, in the general scheme by those constant meetings
    between science and poetry, of which the most famous and beautiful are
    the visit of Sir Henry Wotton to Kepler, and the visit of Milton to
    Galileo in prison.


    Even if science and poetry were as deadly opposites as the shallow
    often affirm, the method and scheme indicated above would at least
    make it possible to convey something of the splendour of the long
    battle for the light in its most human aspect. Poetry has its own
    precision of expression and, in modern times, it has been seeking more
    and more for truth, sometimes even at the expense of beauty. It may be
    possible to carry that quest a stage farther, to the point where, in
    the great rhythmical laws of the universe revealed by science, truth
    and beauty are reunited. If poetry can do this, it will not be without
    some value to science itself, and it will be playing its part in the
    reconstruction of a shattered world. The passing of the old order of
    dogmatic religion has left the modern world in a strange chaos,
    craving for something in which it can unfeignedly believe, and often
    following will-o'-the-wisps. Forty years ago, Matthew Arnold
    prophesied that it would be for poetry, “where it is worthy of its
    high destinies,” to help to carry on the purer fire, and to express in
    new terms those eternal ideas which must ever be the only sure stay of
    the human race. It is not within the province of science to attempt a
    post-Copernican justification of the ways of God to man; but, in the
    laws of nature revealed by science, and in “that grand sequence of
    events which”—as Darwin affirmed—“the mind refuses to accept as the
    result of blind chance,” poetry may discover its own new grounds for
    the attempt. It is easy to assume that all hope and faith are shallow.
    It is even easier to practise a really shallow and devitalising
    pessimism. The modern annunciation that there is a skeleton an inch
    beneath the skin of man is neither new nor profound. Neither science
    nor poetry can rest there; and if, in this poem, an attempt is made to
    show that spiritual values are not diminished or overwhelmed by the
    “fifteen hundred universes” that passed in review before the telescope
    of Herschel, it is only after the opposite argument—so common and so
    easy to-day—has been faced; and only after poetry has at least
    endeavoured to follow the torch of science to its own deep-set
    boundary-mark in that immense darkness of Space and Time.








    PROLOGUE




    THE OBSERVATORY



    At noon, upon the mountain's purple height,
    Above the pine-woods and the clouds it shone
    No larger than the small white dome of shell
    Left by the fledgling wren when wings are born.
    By night it joined the company of heaven,
    And, with its constant light, became a star.
    A needle-point of light, minute, remote,
    It sent a subtler message through the abyss,
    Held more significance for the seeing eye
    Than all the darkness that would blot it out,
    Yet could not dwarf it.
                         High in heaven it shone,
    Alive with all the thoughts, and hopes, and dreams
    Of man's adventurous mind.
                         Up there, I knew
    The explorers of the sky, the pioneers
    Of science, now made ready to attack
    That darkness once again, and win new worlds.
    To-morrow night they hoped to crown the toil
    Of twenty years, and turn upon the sky
    The noblest weapon ever made by man.
    War had delayed them. They had been drawn away
    Designing darker weapons. But no gun
    Could outrange this.


    “To-morrow night”—so wrote their chief—“we try
    Our great new telescope, the hundred-inch.
    Your Milton's 'optic tube' has grown in power
    Since Galileo, famous, blind, and old,
    Talked with him, in that prison, of the sky.
    We creep to power by inches. Europe trusts
    Her 'giant forty' still. Even to-night
    Our own old sixty has its work to do;
    And now our hundred-inch . . . I hardly dare
    To think what this new muzzle of ours may find.
    Come up, and spend that night among the stars
    Here, on our mountain-top. If all goes well,
    Then, at the least, my friend, you'll see a moon
    Stranger, but nearer, many a thousand mile
    Than earth has ever seen her, even in dreams.
    As for the stars, if seeing them were all,
    Three thousand million new-found points of light
    Is our rough guess. But never speak of this.
    You know our press. They'd miss the one result
    To flash 'three thousand millions' round the world.”
    To-morrow night! For more than twenty years,
    They had thought and planned and worked. Ten years had gone,
    One-fourth, or more, of man's brief working life,
    Before they made those solid tons of glass,
    Their hundred-inch reflector, the clear pool,
    The polished flawless pool that it must be
    To hold the perfect image of a star.
    And, even now, some secret flaw—none knew
    Until to-morrow's test—might waste it all.
    Where was the gambler that would stake so much,—
    Time, patience, treasure, on a single throw?
    The cost of it,—they'd not find that again,
    Either in gold or life-stuff! All their youth
    Was fuel to the flame of this one work.
    Once in a lifetime to the man of science,
    Despite what fools believe his ice-cooled blood,
    There comes this drama.
                         If he fails, he fails
    Utterly. He at least will have no time
    For fresh beginnings. Other men, no doubt,
    Years hence, will use the footholes that he cut
    In those precipitous cliffs, and reach the height,
    But he will never see it.”
                         So for me,
    The light words of that letter seemed to hide
    The passion of a lifetime, and I shared
    The crowning moment of its hope and fear.
    Next day, through whispering aisles of palm we rode
    Up to the foot-hills, dreaming desert-hills
    That to assuage their own delicious drought
    Had set each tawny sun-kissed slope ablaze
    With peach and orange orchards.
                         Up and up,
    Along the thin white trail that wound and climbed
    And zig-zagged through the grey-green mountain sage,
    The car went crawling, till the shining plain
    Below it, like an airman's map, unrolled.
    Houses and orchards dwindled to white specks
    In midget cubes and squares of tufted green.
    Once, as we rounded one steep curve, that made
    The head swim at the canyoned gulf below,
    We saw through thirty miles of lucid air
    Elvishly small, sharp as a crumpled petal
    Blown from the stem, a yard away, a sail
    Lazily drifting on the warm blue sea.
    Up for nine miles along that spiral trail
    Slowly we wound to reach the lucid height
    Above the clouds, where that white dome of shell,
    No wren's now, but an eagle's, took the flush
    Of dying day. The sage-brush all died out,
    And all the southern growths, and round us now,
    Firs of the north, and strong, storm-rooted pines
    Exhaled a keener fragrance; till, at last,
    Reversing all the laws of lesser hills,
    They towered like giants round us. Darkness fell
    Before we reached the mountain's naked height.


    Over us, like some great cathedral dome,
    The observatory loomed against the sky;
    And the dark mountain with its headlong gulfs
    Had lost all memory of the world below;
    For all those cloudless throngs of glittering stars
    And all those glimmerings where the abyss of space
    Is powdered with a milky dust, each grain
    A burning sun, and every sun the lord
    Of its own darkling planets,—all those lights
    Met, in a darker deep, the lights of earth,
    Lights on the sea, lights of invisible towns,
    Trembling and indistinguishable from stars,
    In those black gulfs around the mountain's feet.
    Then, into the glimmering dome, with bated breath,
    We entered, and, above us, in the gloom
    Saw that majestic weapon of the light
    Uptowering like the shaft of some huge gun
    Through one arched rift of sky.
                         Dark at its base
    With naked arms, the crew that all day long
    Had sweated to make ready for this night
    Waited their captain's word.
                         The switchboard shone
    With elfin lamps of white and red, and keys
    Whence, at a finger's touch, that monstrous tube
    Moved like a creature dowered with life and will,
    To peer from deep to deep.
                         Below it pulsed
    The clock-machine that slowly, throb by throb,
    Timed to the pace of the revolving earth,
    Drove the titanic muzzle on and on,
    Fixed to the chosen star that else would glide
    Out of its field of vision.
                         So, set free
    Balanced against the wheel of time, it swung,
    Or rested, while, to find new realms of sky
    The dome that housed it, like a moon revolved,
    So smoothly that the watchers hardly knew
    They moved within; till, through the glimmering doors,
    They saw the dark procession of the pines
    Like Indian warriors, quietly stealing by.


    Then, at a word, the mighty weapon dipped
    Its muzzle and aimed at one small point of light
    One seeming insignificant star.
                         The chief,
    Mounting the ladder, while we held our breath,
    Looked through the eye-piece.
                         Then we heard him laugh
    His thanks to God, and hide it in a jest.
    “A prominence on Jupiter!”—
                         They laughed,
    “What do you mean?”—“It's moving,” cried the chief,
    They laughed again, and watched his glimmering face
    High overhead against that moving tower.
    “Come up and see, then!”
                         One by one they went,
    And, though each laughed as he returned to earth,
    Their souls were in their eyes.
                         Then I, too, looked,
    And saw that insignificant spark of light
    Touched with new meaning, beautifully reborn,
    A swimming world, a perfect rounded pearl,
    Poised in the violet sky; and, as I gazed,
    I saw a miracle,—right on its upmost edge
    A tiny mound of white that slowly rose,
    Then, like an exquisite seed-pearl, swung quite clear
    And swam in heaven above its parent world
    To greet its three bright sister-moons.
                         A moon,
    Of Jupiter, no more, but clearer far
    Than mortal eyes had seen before from earth,
    O, beautiful and clear beyond all dreams
    Was that one silver phrase of the starry tune
    Which Galileo's “old discoverer” first
    Dimly revealed, dissolving into clouds
    The imagined fabric of our universe.
    “Jupiter stands in heaven and will stand
    Though all the sycophants bark at him,”
    he cried,
    Hailing the truth before he, too, went down,
    Whelmed in the cloudy wreckage of that dream.


    So one by one we looked, the men who served
    Urania, and the men from Vulcan's forge.
    A beautiful eagerness in the darkness lit
    The swarthy faces that too long had missed
    A meaning in the dull mechanic maze
    Of labour on this blind earth, but found it now.
    Though only a moment's wandering melody
    Hopelessly far above, it gave their toil
    Its only consecration and its joy.
    There, with dark-smouldering eyes and naked throats,
    Blue-dungareed, red-shirted, grimed and smeared
    With engine-grease and sweat, they gathered round
    The foot of that dim ladder; each muttering low
    As he came down, his wonder at what he saw
    To those who waited,—a picture for the brush
    Of Rembrandt, lighted only by the rift
    Above them, where the giant muzzle thrust
    Out through the dim arched roof, and slowly throbbed,
    Against the slowly moving wheel of the earth,
    Holding their chosen star.
                         There, like an elf,
    Perched on the side of that dark slanting tower
    The Italian mechanician watched the moons,
    That Italy discovered.
                         One by one,
    American, English, French, and Dutch, they climbed
    To see the wonder that their own blind hands
    Had helped to achieve.
                         At midnight while they paused
    To adjust the clock-machine, I wandered out
    Alone, into the silence of the night.
    The silence? On that lonely height I heard
    Eternal voices;
    For, as I looked into the gulf beneath,
    Whence almost all the lights had vanished now,
    The whole dark mountain seemed to have lost its earth
    And to be sailing like a ship through heaven.
    All round it surged the mighty sea-like sound
    Of soughing pine-woods, one vast ebb and flow
    Of absolute peace, aloof from all earth's pain,
    So calm, so quiet, it seemed the cradle-song,
    The deep soft breathing of the universe
    Over its youngest child, the soul of man.
    And, as I listened, that Aeolian voice
    Became an invocation and a prayer:
    O you, that on your loftier mountain dwell
    And move like light in light among the thoughts
    Of heaven, translating our mortality
    Into immortal song, is there not one
    Among you that can turn to music now
    This long dark fight for truth? Not one to touch
    With beauty this long battle for the light,
    This little victory of the spirit of man
    Doomed to defeat—for what was all we saw
    To that which neither eyes nor soul could see?—
    Doomed to defeat and yet unconquerable,
    Climbing its nine miles nearer to the stars.
    Wars we have sung. The blind, blood-boltered kings
    Move with an epic music to their thrones.
    Have you no song, then, of that nobler war?
    Of those who strove for light, but could not dream
    Even of this victory that they helped to win,
    Silent discoverers, lonely pioneers,
    Prisoners and exiles, martyrs of the truth
    Who handed on the fire, from age to age;
    Of those who, step by step, drove back the night
    And struggled, year on year, for one more glimpse
    Among the stars, of sovran law, their guide;
    Of those who searching inward, saw the rocks
    Dissolving into a new abyss, and saw
    Those planetary systems far within,
    Atoms, electrons, whirling on their way
    To build and to unbuild our solid world;
    Of those who conquered, inch by difficult inch,
    The freedom of this realm of law for man;
    Dreamers of dreams, the builders of our hope,
    The healers and the binders up of wounds,
    Who, while the dynasts drenched the world with blood,
    Would in the still small circle of a lamp
    Wrestle with death like Heracles of old
    To save one stricken child.
                         Is there no song
    To touch this moving universe of law
    With ultimate light, the glimmer of that great dawn
    Which over our ruined altars yet shall break
    In purer splendour, and restore mankind
    From darker dreams than even Lucretius knew
    To vision of that one Power which guides the world.
    How should men find it? Only through those doors
    Which, opening inward, in each separate soul
    Give each man access to that Soul of all
    Living within each life, not to be found
    Or known, till, looking inward, each alone
    Meets the unknowable and eternal God.


    And there was one that moved like light in light
    Before me there,—Love, human and divine,
    That can exalt all weakness into power,—
    Whispering, Take this deathless torch of song...
    Whispering, but with such faith, that even I
    Was humbled into thinking this might be
    Through love, though all the wisdom of the world
    Account it folly.
                      Let my breast be bared
    To every shaft, then, so that Love be still
    My one celestial guide the while I sing
    Of those who caught the pure Promethean fire
    One from another, each crying as he went down
    To one that waited, crowned with youth and joy,—
    Take thou the splendour, carry it out of sight
    Into the great new age I must not know,
    Into the great new realm I must not tread
    .






    I. COPERNICUS





    The neighbours gossiped idly at the door.
    Copernicus lay dying overhead.
    His little throng of friends, with startled eyes,
    Whispered together, in that dark house of dreams,
    From which by one dim crevice in the wall
    He used to watch the stars.
                         “His book has come
    From Nuremberg at last; but who would dare
    To let him see it now?”—
                         “They have altered it!
    Though Rome approved in full, this preface, look,
    Declares that his discoveries are a dream!”—
    “He has asked a thousand times if it has come;
    Could we tear out those pages?”—
                         “He'd suspect.”—
    “What shall be done, then?”—
                         “Hold it back awhile.
    That was the priest's voice in the room above.
    He may forget it. Those last sacraments
    May set his mind at rest, and bring him peace.”—
    Then, stealing quietly to that upper door,
    They opened it a little, and saw within
    The lean white deathbed of Copernicus
    Who made our world a world without an end.
    There, in that narrow room, they saw his face
    Grey, seamed with thought, lit by a single lamp;
    They saw those glorious eyes
    Closing, that once had looked beyond the spheres
    And seen our ancient firmaments dissolve
    Into a boundless night.
                         Beside him knelt
    Two women, like bowed shadows. At his feet,
    An old physician watched him. At his head,
    The cowled Franciscan murmured, while the light
    Shone faintly on the chalice.
                         All grew still.
    The fragrance of the wine was like faint flowers,
    The first breath of those far celestial fields....


    Then, like a dying soldier, that must leave
    His last command to others, while the fight
    Is yet uncertain, and the victory far,
    Copernicus whispered, in a fevered dream,
    “Yes, it is Death. But you must hold him back,
    There, in the doorway, for a little while,
    Until I know the work is rightly done.
    Use all your weapons, doctor. I must live
    To see and touch one copy of my book.
    Have they not brought it yet?
                         They promised me
    It should be here by nightfall.
                         One of you go
    And hasten it. I can hold back
    Death till dawn.


    Have they not brought it yet?—from Nuremberg.
    Do not deceive me. I must know it safe,
    Printed and safe, for other men to use.
    I could die then. My use would be fulfilled.
    What has delayed them? Will not some one go
    And tell them that my strength is running out?
    Tell them that book would be an angel's hand
    In mine, an easier pillow for my head,
    A little lantern in the engulfing dark.
    You see, I hid its struggling light so long
    Under too small a bushel, and I fear
    It may go out forever. In the noon
    Of life's brief day, I could not see the need
    As now I see it, when the night shuts down.
    I was afraid, perhaps, it might confuse
    The lights that guide us for the souls of men.


    But now I see three stages in our life.
    At first, we bask contented in our sun
    And take what daylight shows us for the truth.
    Then we discover, in some midnight grief,
    How all day long the sunlight blinded us
    To depths beyond, where all our knowledge dies.
    That's where men shrink, and lose their way in doubt.
    Then, last, as death draws nearer, comes a night
    In whose majestic shadow men see God,
    Absolute Knowledge, reconciling all.
    So, all my life I pondered on that scheme
    Which makes this earth the centre of all worlds,
    Lighted and wheeled around by sun and moon
    And that great crystal sphere wherein men thought
    Myriads of lesser stars were fixed like lamps,
    Each in its place,—one mighty glittering wheel
    Revolving round this dark abode of man.
    Night after night, with even pace they moved.
    Year after year, not altering by one point,
    Their order, or their stations, those fixed stars
    In that revolving firmament. The Plough
    Still pointed to the Pole. Fixed in their sphere,
    How else explain that vast unchanging wheel?
    How, but by thinking all those lesser lights
    Were huger suns, divided from our earth
    By so immense a gulf that, if they moved
    Ten thousand leagues an hour among themselves,
    It would not seem one hair's-breadth to our eyes.
    Utterly inconceivable, I know;
    And yet we daily kneel to boundless Power
    And build our hope on that Infinitude.


    This did not daunt me, then. Indeed, I saw
    Light upon chaos. Many discordant dreams
    Began to move in lucid music now.
    For what could be more baffling than the thought
    That those enormous heavens must circle earth
    Diurnally—a journey that would need
    Swiftness to which the lightning flash would seem
    A white slug creeping on the walls of night;
    While, if earth softly on her axle spun
    One quiet revolution answered all.
    It was our moving selves that made the sky
    Seem to revolve. Have not all ages seen
    A like illusion baffling half mankind
    In life, thought, art? Men think, at every turn
    Of their own souls, the very heavens have moved.


    Light upon chaos, light, and yet more light;
    For—as I watched the planets—Venus, Mars,
    Appeared to wax and wane from month to month
    As though they moved, now near, now far, from earth.
    Earth could not be their centre. Was the sun
    Their sovran lord then, as Pythagoras held?
    Was this great earth, so 'stablished, so secure,
    A planet also? Did it also move
    Around the sun? If this were true, my friends,
    No revolution in this world's affairs,
    Not that blind maelstrom where imperial Rome
    Went down into the dark, could so engulf
    All that we thought we knew. We who believed
    In our own majesty, we who walked with gods
    As younger sons on this proud central stage,
    Round which the whole bright firmament revolved
    For our especial glory, must we creep
    Like ants upon our midget ball of dust
    Lost in immensity?
                       I could not take
    That darkness lightly. I withheld my book
    For many a year, until I clearly saw,
    And Rome approved me—have they not brought it yet?—
    That this tremendous music could not drown
    The still supernal music of the soul,
    Or quench the light that shone when Christ was born.
    For who, if one lost star could lead the kings
    To God's own Son, would shrink from following these
    To His eternal throne?
                         This at the least
    We know, the soul of man can soar through heaven.
    It is our own wild wings that dwarf the world
    To nothingness beneath us. Let the soul
    Take courage, then. If its own thought be true,
    Not all the immensities of little minds
    Can ever quench its own celestial fire.
    No. This new night was needed, that the soul
    Might conquer its own kingdom and arise
    To its full stature. So, in face of death,
    I saw that I must speak the truth I knew.


    Have they not brought it? What delays my book?
    I am afraid. Tell me the truth, my friends.
    At this last hour, the Church may yet withhold
    Her sanction. Not the Church, but those who think
    A little darkness helps her.
                         Were this true,
    They would do well. If the poor light we win
    Confuse or blind us, to the Light of lights,
    Let all our wisdom perish. I affirm
    A greater Darkness, where the one true Church
    Shall after all her agonies of loss
    And many an age of doubt, perhaps, to come,
    See this processional host of splendours burn
    Like tapers round her altar.
                         So I speak
    Not for myself, but for the age unborn.
    I caught the fire from those who went before,
    The bearers of the torch who could not see
    The goal to which they strained. I caught their fire,
    And carried it, only a little way beyond;
    But there are those that wait for it, I know,
    Those who will carry it on to victory.
    I dare not fail them. Looking back, I see
    Those others,—fallen, with their arms outstretched
    Dead, pointing to the future.
                         Far, far back,
    Before the Egyptians built their pyramids
    With those dark funnels pointing to the north,
    Through which the Pharaohs from their desert tombs
    Gaze all night long upon the Polar Star,
    Some wandering Arab crept from death to life
    Led by the Plough across those wastes of pearl....


    Long, long ago—have they not brought it yet?
    My book?—I finished it one summer's night,
    And felt my blood all beating into song.
    I meant to print those verses in my book,
    A prelude, hinting at that deeper night
    Which darkens all our knowledge. Then I thought
    The measure moved too lightly.
                         Do you recall
    Those verses, Elsa? They would pass the time.
    How happy I was the night I wrote that song!”
    Then, one of those bowed shadows raised her head
    And, like a mother crooning to her child,
    Murmured the words he wrote, so long ago.


    In old Cathay, in far Cathay,
      Before the western world began,
    They saw the moving fount of day
      Eclipsed, as by a shadowy fan;
    They stood upon their Chinese wall.
      They saw his fire to ashes fade,
    And felt the deeper slumber fall
      On domes of pearl and towers of jade.


    With slim brown hands, in Araby,
      They traced, upon the desert sand,
    Their Rams and Scorpions of the sky,
      And strove—and failed—to understand.
    Before their footprints were effaced
      The shifting sand forgot their rune;
    Their hieroglyphs were all erased,
      Their desert naked to the moon.


    In Bagdad of the purple nights,
      Haroun Al Raschid built a tower,
    Where sages watched a thousand lights
      And read their legends, for an hour.
    The tower is down, the Caliph dead,
      Their astrolabes are wrecked with rust.
    Orion glitters overhead,
      Aladdin's lamp is in the dust.


    In Babylon, in Babylon,
      They baked their tablets of the clay;
    And, year by year, inscribed thereon
      The dark eclipses of their day;
    They saw the moving finger write
      Its Mene, Mene, on their sun.
    A mightier shadow cloaks their light,
      And clay is clay in Babylon.


    A shadow moved towards him from the door.
    Copernicus, with a cry, upraised his head.
    “The book, I cannot see it, let me feel
    The lettering on the cover.
                         It is here!
    Put out the lamp, now. Draw those curtains back,
    And let me die with starlight on my face.
    An angel's hand in mine . . . yes; I can say
    My nunc dimittis now . . . light, and more light
    In that pure realm whose darkness is our peace.”






    II. TYCHO BRAKE





    I



    They thought him a magician, Tycho Brahe,
    Who lived on that strange island in the Sound,
    Nine miles from Elsinore.
                         His legend reached
    The Mermaid Inn the year that Shakespeare died.
    Fynes Moryson had brought his travellers' tales
    Of Wheen, the heart-shaped isle where Tycho made
    His great discoveries, and, with Jeppe, his dwarf,
    And flaxen-haired Christine, the peasant girl,
    Dreamed his great dreams for five-and-twenty years.
    For there he lit that lanthorn of the law,
    Uraniborg; that fortress of the truth,
    With Pegasus flying above its loftiest tower,
    While, in its roofs, like wide enchanted eyes
    Watching, the brightest windows in the world,
    Opened upon the stars.


    Nine miles from Elsinore, with all those ghosts,
    There's magic enough in that! But white-cliffed Wheen,
    Six miles in girth, with crowds of hunchback waves
    Crawling all round it, and those moonstruck windows,
    Held its own magic, too; for Tycho Brahe
    By his mysterious alchemy of dreams
    Had so enriched the soil, that when the king
    Of England wished to buy it, Denmark asked
    A price too great for any king on earth.
    “Give us,” they said, “in scarlet cardinal's cloth
    Enough to cover it, and, at every corner,
    Of every piece, a right rose-noble too;
    Then all that kings can buy of Wheen is yours.
    Only,” said they, “a merchant bought it once;
    And, when he came to claim it, goblins flocked
    All round him, from its forty goblin farms,
    And mocked him, bidding him take away the stones
    That he had bought, for nothing else was his.”
    These things were fables. They were also true.
    They thought him a magician, Tycho Brahe,
    The astrologer, who wore the mask of gold.
    Perhaps he was. There's magic in the truth;
    And only those who find and follow its laws
    Can work its miracles.
                         Tycho sought the truth
    From that strange year in boyhood when he heard
    The great eclipse foretold; and, on the day
    Appointed, at the very minute even,
    Beheld the weirdly punctual shadow creep
    Across the sun, bewildering all the birds
    With thoughts of evening.
                         Picture him, on that day,
    The boy at Copenhagen, with his mane
    Of thick red hair, thrusting his freckled face
    Out of his upper window, holding the piece
    Of glass he blackened above his candle-flame
    To watch that orange ember in the sky
    Wane into smouldering ash.
                         He whispered there,
    “So it is true. By searching in the heavens,
    Men can foretell the future.”
                         In the street
    Below him, throngs were babbling of the plague
    That might or might not follow.
                         He resolved
    To make himself the master of that deep art
    And know what might be known.
                         He bought the books
    Of Stadius, with his tables of the stars.
    Night after night, among the gabled roofs,
    Climbing and creeping through a world unknown
    Save to the roosting stork, he learned to find
    The constellations, Cassiopeia's throne,
    The Plough still pointing to the Polar Star,
    The sword-belt of Orion. There he watched
    The movements of the planets, hours on hours,
    And wondered at the mystery of it all.
    All this he did in secret, for his birth
    Was noble, and such wonderings were a sign
    Of low estate, when Tycho Brahe was young;
    And all his kinsmen hoped that Tycho Brahe
    Would live, serene as they, among his dogs
    And horses; or, if honour must be won,
    Let the superfluous glory flow from fields
    Where blood might still be shed; or from those courts
    Where statesmen lie. But Tycho sought the truth.
    So, when they sent him in his tutor's charge
    To Leipzig, for such studies as they held
    More worthy of his princely blood, he searched
    The Almagest; and, while his tutor slept,
    Measured the delicate angles of the stars,
    Out of his window, with his compasses,
    His only instrument. Even with this rude aid
    He found so many an ancient record wrong
    That more and more he burned to find the truth.


    One night at home, as Tycho searched the sky,
    Out of his window, compasses in hand,
    Fixing one point upon a planet, one
    Upon some loftier star, a ripple of laughter
    Startled him, from the garden walk below.
    He lowered his compass, peered into the dark
    And saw—Christine, the blue-eyed peasant girl,
    With bare brown feet, standing among the flowers.
    She held what seemed an apple in her hand;
    And, in a voice that Aprilled all his blood,
    The low soft voice of earth, drawing him down
    From those cold heights to that warm breast of Spring,
    A natural voice that had not learned to use
    The false tones of the world, simple and clear
    As a bird's voice, out of the fragrant darkness called,
    “I saw it falling from your window-ledge!
    I thought it was an apple, till it rolled
    Over my foot.
                  It's heavy. Shall I try
    To throw it back to you?”
                         Tycho saw a stain
    Of purple across one small arched glistening foot.
    “Your foot Is bruised,” he cried.
                         “O no,” she laughed,
    And plucked the stain off. “Only a petal, see.”
    She showed it to him.
                         “But this—I wonder now
    If I can throw it.”
                        Twice she tried and failed;
    Or Tycho failed to catch that slippery sphere.
    He saw the supple body swaying below,
    The ripe red lips that parted as she laughed,
    And those deep eyes where all the stars were drowned.


    At the third time he caught it; and she vanished,
    Waving her hand, a little floating moth,
    Between the pine-trees, into the warm dark night.
    He turned into his room, and quickly thrust
    Under his pillow that forbidden fruit;
    For the door opened, and the hot red face
    Of Otto Brahe, his father, glowered at him.
    “What's this? What's this?”
                         The furious-eyed old man
    Limped to the bedside, pulled the mystery out,
    And stared upon the strangest apple of Eve
    That ever troubled Eden,—heavy as bronze,
    And delicately enchased with silver stars,
    The small celestial globe that Tycho bought
    In Leipzig.
                Then the storm burst on his head!
    This moon-struck 'pothecary's-prentice work,
    These cheap-jack calendar-maker's gypsy tricks
    Would damn the mother of any Knutsdorp squire,
    And crown his father like a stag of ten.
    Quarrel on quarrel followed from that night,
    Till Tycho sickened of his ancient name;
    And, wandering through the woods about his home,
    Found on a hill-top, ringed with fragrant pines,
    A little open glade of whispering ferns.
    Thither, at night, he stole to watch the stars;
    And there he told the oldest tale on earth
    To one that watched beside him, one whose eyes
    Shone with true love, more beautiful than the stars,
    A daughter of earth, the peasant-girl, Christine.


    They met there, in the dusk, on his last night
    At home, before he went to Wittenberg.
    They stood knee-deep among the whispering ferns,
    And said good-bye.
                       “I shall return,” he said,
    “And shame them for their folly, who would set
    Their pride above the stars, Christine, and you.
    At Wittenberg or Rostoch I shall find
    More chances and more knowledge. All those worlds
    Are still to conquer. We know nothing yet;
    The books are crammed with fables. They foretell
    Here an eclipse, and there a dawning moon,
    But most of them were out a month or more
    On Jupiter and Saturn.
                         There's one way,
    And only one, to knowledge of the law
    Whereby the stars are steered, and so to read
    The future, even perhaps the destinies
    Of men and nations,—only one sure way,
    And that's to watch them, watch them, and record
    The truth we know, and not the lies we dream.
    Dear, while I watch them, though the hills and sea
    Divide us, every night our eyes can meet
    Among those constant glories. Every night
    Your eyes and mine, upraised to that bright realm,
    Can, in one moment, speak across the world.
    I shall come back with knowledge and with power,
    And you—will wait for me?”
                         She answered him
    In silence, with the starlight of her eyes.






    II



    He watched the skies at Wittenberg. The plague
    Drove him to Rostoch, and he watched them there;
    But, even there, the plague of little minds
    Beset him. At a wedding-feast he met
    His noble countryman, Manderup, who asked,
    With mocking courtesy, whether Tycho Brahe
    Was ready yet to practise his black art
    At country fairs. The guests, and Tycho, laughed;
    Whereat the swaggering Junker blandly sneered,
    “If fortune-telling fail, Christine will dance,
    Thus—tambourine on hip,” he struck a pose.
    “Her pretty feet will pack that booth of yours.”
    They fought, at midnight, in a wood, with swords.
    And not a spark of light but those that leapt
    Blue from the clashing blades. Tycho had lost
    His moon and stars awhile, almost his life;
    For, in one furious bout, his enemy's blade
    Dashed like a scribble of lightning into the face
    Of Tycho Brahe, and left him spluttering blood,
    Groping through that dark wood with outstretched hands,
    To fall in a death-black swoon.
                         They carried him back
    To Rostoch; and when Tycho saw at last
    That mirrored patch of mutilated flesh,
    Seared as by fire, between the frank blue eyes
    And firm young mouth where, like a living flower
    Upon some stricken tree, youth lingered still,
    He'd but one thought, Christine would shrink from him
    In fear, or worse, in pity. An end had come
    Worse than old age, to all the glory of youth.
    Urania would not let her lover stray
    Into a mortal's arms. He must remain
    Her own, for ever; and for ever, alone.


    Yet, as the days went by, to face the world,
    He made himself a delicate mask of gold
    And silver, shaped like those that minstrels wear
    At carnival in Venice, or when love,
    Disguising its disguise of mortal flesh,
    Wooes as a nameless prince from far away.
    And when this world's day, with its blaze and coil
    Was ended, and the first white star awoke
    In that pure realm where all our tumults die,
    His eyes and hers, meeting on Hesperus,
    Renewed their troth.
                         He seemed to see Christine,
    Ringed by the pine-trees on that distant hill,
    A small white figure, lost in space and time,
    Yet gazing at the sky, and conquering all,
    Height, depth, and heaven itself, by the sheer power
    Of love at one with everlasting laws,
    A love that shared the constancy of heaven,
    And spoke to him across, above, the world.






    III



    Not till he crossed the Danube did he find
    Among the fountains and the storied eaves
    Of Augsburg, one to share his task with him.
    Paul Hainzel, of that city, greatly loved
    To talk with Tycho of the strange new dreams
    Copernicus had kindled. Did this earth
    Move? Was the sun the centre of our scheme?
    And Tycho told him, there is but one way
    To know the truth, and that's to sweep aside
    All the dark cobwebs of old sophistry,
    And watch and learn that moving alphabet,
    Each smallest silver character inscribed
    Upon the skies themselves, noting them down,
    Till on a day we find them taking shape
    In phrases, with a meaning; and, at last,
    The hard-won beauty of that celestial book
    With all its epic harmonies unfold
    Like some great poet's universal song.


    He was a great magician, Tycho Brahe.
    “Hainzel,” he said, “we have no magic wand,
    But what the truth can give us. If we find
    Even with a compass, through a bedroom window,
    That half the glittering Almagest is wrong,
    Think you, what noble conquests might be ours,
    Had we but nobler instruments.”
                         He showed
    Quivering with eagerness, his first rude plan
    For that great quadrant,—not the wooden toy
    Of old Scultetus, but a kingly weapon,
    Huge as a Roman battering-ram, and fine
    In its divisions as any goldsmith's work.
    “It could be built,” said Tycho, “but the cost
    Would buy a dozen culverin for your wars.”
    Then Hainzel, fired by Tycho's burning brain,
    Answered, “We'll make it We've a war to wage
    On Chaos, and his kingdoms of the night.”
    They chose the cunningest artists of the town,
    Clock-makers, jewellers, carpenters, and smiths,
    And, setting them all afire with Tycho's dream,
    Within a month his dream was oak and brass.
    Its beams were fourteen cubits, solid oak,
    Banded with iron. Its arch was polished brass
    Whereon five thousand exquisite divisions
    Were marked to show the minutes of degrees.


    So huge and heavy it was, a score of men,
    Could hardly drag and fix it to its place
    In Hainzel's garden.
                         Many a shining night,
    Tycho and Hainzel, out of that maze of flowers,
    Charted the stars, discovering point by point,
    How all the records erred, until the fame
    Of this new master, hovering above the schools
    Like a strange hawk, threatened the creeping dreams
    Of all the Aristotelians, and began
    To set their mouse-holes twittering “Tycho Brahe!”


    Then Tycho Brahe came home, to find Christine.
    Up to that whispering glade of ferns he sped,
    At the first wink of Hesperus.
                         He stood
    In shadow, under the darkest pine, to hide
    The little golden mask upon his face.
    He wondered, will she shrink from me in fear
    Or loathing? Will she even come at all?
    And, as he wondered, like a light she moved
    Before him.
                “Is it you?”—
                         “Christine! Christine,”
    He whispered, “It is I, the mountebank,
    Playing a jest upon you. It's only a mask!
    Do not be frightened. I am here behind it.”


    Her red lips parted, and between them shone,
    The little teeth like white pomegranate seeds.
    He saw her frightened eyes.
                         Then, with a cry,
    Her arms went round him, and her eyelids closed.
    Lying against his heart, she set her lips
    Against his lips, and claimed him for her own.






    IV



    One frosty night, as Tycho bent his way
    Home to the dark old abbey, he upraised
    His eyes, and saw a portent in the sky.
    There, in its most familiar patch of blue,
    Where Cassiopeia's five-fold glory burned,
    An unknown brilliance quivered, a huge star
    Unseen before, a strange new visitant
    To heavens unchangeable, as the world believed,
    Since the creation.
                        Could new stars be born?
    Night after night he watched that miracle
    Growing and changing colour as it grew;
    White at the first, and large as Jupiter;
    And, in the third month, yellow, and larger yet;
    Red in the fifth month, like Aldebaran,
    And larger even than Lyra. In the seventh,
    Bluish like Saturn; whence it dulled and dwined
    Little by little, till after eight months more
    Into the dark abysmal blue of night,
    Whence it arose, the wonder died away.
    But, while it blazed above him, Tycho brought
    Those delicate records of two hundred nights
    To Copenhagen. There, in his golden mask,
    At supper with Pratensis, who believed
    Only what old books told him, Tycho met
    Dancey, the French Ambassador, rainbow-gay
    In satin hose and doublet, supple and thin,
    Brown-eyed, and bearded with a soft black tuft
    Neat as a blackbird's wing,—a spirit as keen
    And swift as France on all the starry trails
    Of thought.
                He saw the deep and simple fire,
    The mystery of all genius in those eyes
    Above that golden wizard.
                         Tycho raised
    His wine-cup, brimming—they thought—with purple dreams;
    And bade them drink to their triumphant Queen
    Of all the Muses, to their Lady of Light
    Urania, and the great new star.
                         They laughed,
    Thinking the young astrologer's golden mask
    Hid a sardonic jest.
                         “The skies are clear,”
    Said Tycho Brahe, “and we have eyes to see.
    Put out your candles. Open those windows there!”
    The colder darkness breathed upon their brows,
    And Tycho pointed, into the deep blue night.
    There, in their most immutable height of heaven,
    In ipso caelo, in the ethereal realm,
    Beyond all planets, red as Mars it burned,
    The one impossible glory.
                         “But it's true!”
    Pratensis gasped; then, clutching the first straw,
    “Now I recall how Pliny the Elder said,
    Hipparchus also saw a strange new star,
    Not where the comets, not where the Rosae bloom
    And fade, but in that solid crystal sphere
    Where nothing changes.”
                         Tycho smiled, and showed
    The record of his watchings.
                         “But the world
    Must know all this,” cried Dancey. “You must print it.”
    “Print it?” said Tycho, turning that golden mask
    On both his friends. “Could I, a noble, print
    This trafficking with Urania in a book?
    They'd hound me out of Denmark! This disgrace
    Of work, with hands or brain, no matter why,
    No matter how, in one who ought to dwell
    Fixed to the solid upper sphere, my friends,
    Would never be forgiven.”
                         Dancey stared
    In mute amazement, but that mask of gold
    Outstared him, sphinx-like, and inscrutable.


    Soon through all Europe, like the blinded moths,
    Roused by a lantern in old palaces
    Among the mouldering tapestries of thought,
    Weird fables woke and fluttered to and fro,
    And wild-eyed sages hunted them for truth.
    The Italian, Frangipani, thought the star
    The lost Electra, that had left her throne
    Among the Pleiads, and plunged into the night
    Like a veiled mourner, when Troy town was burned.
    The German painter, Busch, of Erfurt, wrote,
    “It was a comet, made of mortal sins;
    A poisonous mist, touched by the wrath of God
    To fire; from which there would descend on earth
    All manner of evil—plagues and sudden death,
    Frenchmen and famine.”
                         Preachers thumped and raved.
    Theodore Beza in Calvin's pulpit tore
    His grim black gown, and vowed it was the Star
    That led the Magi. It had now returned
    To mark the world's end and the Judgment Day.
    Then, in this hubbub, Dancey told the king
    Of Denmark, “There is one who knows the truth—
    Your subject Tycho Brahe, who, night by night,
    Watched and recorded all that truth could see.
    It would bring honour to all Denmark, sire,
    If Tycho could forget his rank awhile,
    And print these great discoveries in a book,
    For all the world to read.”
                         So Tycho Brahe
    Received a letter in the king's own hand,
    Urging him, “Truth is the one pure fountain-head
    Of all nobility. Pray forget your rank.”
    His noble kinsmen echoed, “If you wish
    To please His Majesty and ourselves, forget
    Your rank.”
                “I will,” said Tycho Brahe;
    “Your reasoning has convinced me. I will print
    My book, 'De Nova Stella.' And to prove
    All you have said concerning temporal rank
    And this eternal truth you love so well,
    I marry, to-day,”—they foamed, but all their mouths
    Were stopped and stuffed and sealed with their own words,—
    “I marry to-day my own true love, Christine.”






    V



    They thought him a magician, Tycho Brahe.
    Perhaps he was. There's magic all around us
    In rocks and trees, and in the minds of men,
    Deep hidden springs of magic.
                         He that strikes
    The rock aright, may find them where he will.


    And Tycho tasted happiness in his hour.
    There was a prince in Denmark in those days;
    And, when he heard how other kings desired
    The secrets of this new astrology,
    He said, “This man, in after years, will bring
    Glory to Denmark, honour to her prince.
    He is a Dane. Give him this isle of Wheen,
    And let him make his great discoveries there.
    Let him have gold to buy his instruments,
    And build his house and his observatory.”


    So Tycho set this island where he lived
    Whispering with wizardry; and, in its heart,
    He lighted that strange lanthorn of the law,
    And built himself that wonder of the world,
    Uraniborg, a fortress for the truth,
    A city of the heavens.
                         Around it ran
    A mighty rampart twenty-two feet high,
    And twenty feet in thickness at the base.
    Its angles pointed north, south, east and west,
    With gates and turrets; and, within this wall,
    Were fruitful orchards, apple, and cherry, and pear;
    And, sheltered in their midst from all but sun,
    A garden, warm and busy with singing bees.
    There, many an hour, his flaxen-haired Christine,
    Sang to her child, her first-born, Magdalen,
    Or watched her playing, a flower among the flowers.
    Dark in the centre of that zone of bliss
    Arose the magic towers of Tycho Brahe.
    Two of them had great windows in their roofs
    Opening upon the sky where'er he willed,
    And under these observatories he made
    A library of many a golden book;
    Poets and sages of old Greece and Rome,
    And many a mellow legend, many a dream
    Of dawning truth in Egypt, or the dusk
    Of Araby. Under all of these he made
    A subterranean crypt for alchemy,
    With sixteen furnaces; and, under this,
    He sank a well, so deep, that Jeppe declared
    He had tapped the central fountains of the world,
    And drew his magic from those cold clear springs.
    This was the very well, said Jeppe, the dwarf,
    Where Truth was hidden; but, by Tycho Brahe
    And his weird skill, the magic water flowed,
    Through pipes, uphill, to all the house above:
    The kitchen where his cooks could broil a trout
    For sages or prepare a feast for kings;
    The garrets for the students in the roof;
    The guest-rooms, and the red room to the north,
    The study and the blue room to the south;
    The small octagonal yellow room that held
    The sunlight like a jewel all day long,
    And Magdalen, with her happy dreams, at night;
    Then, facing to the west, one long green room,
    The ceiling painted like the bower of Eve
    With flowers and leaves, the windows opening wide
    Through which Christine and Tycho Brahe at dawn
    Could see the white sails drifting on the Sound
    Like petals from their orchard.
                         To the north,
    He built a printing house for noble books,
    Poems, and those deep legends of the sky,
    Still to be born at his Uraniborg.
    Beyond the rampart to the north arose
    A workshop for his instruments. To the south
    A low thatched farm-house rambled round a yard
    Alive with clucking hens; and, further yet
    To southward on another hill, he made
    A great house for his larger instruments,
    And called it Stiernborg, mountain of the stars.


    And, on his towers and turrets, Tycho set
    Statues with golden verses in the praise
    Of famous men, the bearers of the torch,
    From Ptolemy to the new Copernicus.
    Then, in that storm-proof mountain of the stars,
    He set in all their splendour of new-made brass
    His armouries for the assault of heaven,—
    Circles in azimuth, armillary spheres,
    Revolving zodiacs with great brazen rings;
    Quadrants of solid brass, ten cubits broad,
    Brass parallactic rules, made to revolve
    In azimuth; clocks with wheels; an astrolabe;
    And that large globe strengthened by oaken beams
    He made at Augsburg.
                         All his gold he spent;
    But Denmark had a prince in those great days;
    And, in his brain, the dreams of Tycho Brahe
    Kindled a thirst for glory. So he made
    Tycho the Lord of sundry lands and rents,
    And Keeper of the Chapel where the kings
    Of Oldenburg were buried; for he said
    “To whom could all these kings entrust their bones
    More fitly than to him who read the stars,
    And though a mortal, knew immortal laws;
    And paced, at night, the silent halls of heaven.”






    VI



    He was a great magician, Tycho Brahe.
    There, on his island, for a score of years,
    He watched the skies, recording star on star,
    For future ages, and, by patient toil,
    Perfected his great tables of the sun,
    The moon, the planets.
                         There, too happy far
    For any history, sons and daughters rose,
    A little clan of love, around Christine;
    And Tycho thought, when I am dead, my sons
    Will rule and work in my Uraniborg.
    And yet a doubt would trouble him, for he knew
    The children of Christine would still be held
    Ignoble, by the world.
                         Disciples came,
    Young-eyed and swift, the bearers of the torch
    From many a city to Uraniborg,
    And Tycho Brahe received them like a king,
    And bade them light their torches at his fire.
    The King of Scotland came, with all his court,
    And dwelt eight days in Tycho Brahe's domain,
    Asking him many a riddle, deep and dark,
    Whose answer, none the less, a king should know.
    What boots it on this earth to be a king,
    To rule a part of earth, and not to know
    The worth of his own realm, whether he rule
    As God's vice-gerent, and his realm be still
    The centre of the centre of all worlds;
    Or whether, as Copernicus proclaimed,
    This earth itself be moving, a lost grain
    Of dust among the innumerable stars?
    For this would dwarf all glory but the soul,
    In king or peasant, that can hail the truth,
    Though truth should slay it.
                         So to Tycho Brahe,
    The king became a subject for eight days.
    But, in the crowded hall, when he had gone,
    Jeppe raised his matted head, with a chuckle of glee,
    Quiet as the gurgle of joy in a dark rock-pool,
    When the first ripple and wash of the first spring-tide
    Flows bubbling under the dry sun-blackened fringe
    Of seaweed, setting it all afloat again,
    In magical colours, like a merman's hair.
    “Jeppe has a thought,” the gay young students cried,
    Thronging him round, for all believed that Jeppe
    Was fey, and had strange visions of the truth.
    “What is the thought, Jeppe?”
                         “I can think no thoughts,”
    Croaked Jeppe. “But I have made myself a song.”
    “Silence,” they cried, “for Jeppe the nightingale!
    Sing, Jeppe!”
      And, wagging his great head to and fro
    Before the fire, with deep dark eyes, he crooned:


        THE SONG OF JEPPE


    “What!” said the king,
       “Is earth a bird or bee?
     Can this uncharted boundless realm of ours
    Drone thro' the sky, with leagues of struggling sea,
      Forests, and hills, and towns, and palace-towers?”
     “Ay,” said the dwarf,
       “I have watched from Stiernborg's crown
      Her far dark rim uplift against the sky;
    But, while earth soars, men say the stars go down;
      And, while earth sails, men say the stars go by.”
    An elvish tale!
        Ask Jeppe, the dwarf! He knows.
      That's why his eyes look fey; for, chuckling deep,
    Heels over head amongst the stars he goes,
      As all men go; but most are sound asleep.
    King, saint, sage,
        Even those that count it true,
      Act as this miracle touched them not at all.
    They are borne, undizzied, thro' the rushing blue,
      And build their empires on a sky-tossed ball.


    Then said the king,
        “If earth so lightly move,
      What of my realm? O, what shall now stand sure?”
    “Naught,” said the dwarf, “in all this world, but love.
      All else is dream-stuff and shall not endure.
    'Tis nearer now!
        Our universe hath no centre,
      Our shadowy earth and fleeting heavens no stay,
    But that deep inward realm which each can enter,
      Even Jeppe, the dwarf, by his own secret way.”


    “Where?” said the king,
        “O, where? I have not found it!”
      “Here,” said the dwarf, and music echoed “here.”
    “This infinite circle hath no line to bound it;
      Therefore that deep strange centre is everywhere.
    Let the earth soar thro' heaven, that centre abideth;
      Or plunge to the pit, His covenant still holds true.
    In the heart of a dying bird, the Master hideth;
      In the soul of a king,” said the dwarf,
        “and in my soul, too.”






    VII



    Princes and courtiers came, a few to seek
    A little knowledge, many more to gape
    In wonder at Tycho's gold and silver mask;
    Or when they saw the beauty of his towers,
    Envy and hate him for them.
                         Thus arose
    The small grey cloud upon the distant sky,
    That broke in storm at last.
                         “Beware,” croaked Jeppe,
    Lifting his shaggy head beside the fire,
    When guests like these had gone, “Master, beware!”
    And Tycho of the frank blue eyes would laugh.
    Even when he found Witichius playing him false
      His anger, like a momentary breeze,
    Died on the dreaming deep; for Tycho Brahe
    Turned to a nobler riddle,—“Have you thought,”
    He asked his young disciples, “how the sea
    Is moved to that strange rhythm we call the tides?
    He that can answer this shall have his name
    Honoured among the bearers of the torch
    While Pegasus flies above Uraniborg.
    I was delayed three hours or more to-day
    By the neap-tide. The fishermen on the coast
    Are never wrong. They time it by the moon.
    Post hoc, perhaps, not propter hoc; and yet
    Through all the changes of the sky and sea
    That old white clock of ours with the battered face
    Does seem infallible.
                         There's a love-song too,
    The sailors on the coast of Sweden sing,
    I have often pondered it. Your courtly poets
    Upbraid the inconstant moon. But these men know
    The moon and sea are lovers, and they move
    In a most constant measure. Hear the words
    And tell me, if you can, what silver chains
    Bind them together.” Then, in a voice as low
    And rhythmical as the sea, he spoke that song:


        THE SHEPHERDESS OF THE SEA


      Reproach not yet our sails' delay;
      You cannot see the shoaling bay,
      The banks of sand, the fretful bars,
      That ebb left naked to the stars.
        The sea's white shepherdess, the moon,
        Shall lead us into harbour soon.


      Dear, when you see her glory shine
      Between your fragrant boughs of pine,
      Know there is but one hour to wait
      Before her hands unlock the gate,
        And the full flood of singing foam
        Follow her lovely footsteps home.


      Then waves like flocks of silver sheep
      Come rustling inland from the deep,
      And into rambling valleys press
      Behind their heavenly shepherdess.
        You cannot see them? Lift your eyes
        And see their mistress in the skies.
      She rises with her silver bow.


      I feel the tide begin to flow;
      And every thought and hope and dream
      Follow her call, and homeward stream.
      Borne on the universal tide,
      The wanderer hastens to his bride.
        The sea's white shepherdess, the moon,
        Shall lead him into harbour, soon.






    VIII



    He was a great magician, Tycho Brahe,
    But not so great that he could read the heart
    Or rule the hand of princes.
                         When his friend
    King Frederick died, the young Prince Christian reigned;
    And, round him, fool and knave made common cause
    Against the magic that could pour their gold
    Into a gulf of stars. This Tycho Brahe
    Had grown too proud. He held them in contempt,
    So they believed; for, when he spoke, their thoughts
    Crept at his feet like spaniels. Junkerdom
    Felt it was foolish, for he towered above it,
    And so it hated him. Did he not spend
    Gold that a fool could spend as quickly as he?
    Were there not great estates bestowed upon him
    In wisdom's name, that from the dawn of time
    Had been the natural right of Junkerdom?
    And would he not bequeath them to his heirs,
    The children of Christine, an unfree woman?
    “Why you, sire, even you,” they told the king,
    “He has made a laughing-stock. That horoscope
    He read for you, the night when you were born,
    Printed, and bound it in green velvet, too,—
    Read it The whole world laughs at it. He said
    That Venus was the star that ruled your fate,
    And Venus would destroy you. Tycho Brahe
    Inspired your royal father with the fear
    That kept your youth so long in leading-strings,
    The fear that every pretty hedgerow flower
    Would be your Circe. So he thought to avenge
    Our mockery of this peasant-girl Christine,
    To whom, indeed, he plays the faithful swine,
    Knowing full well his gold and silver nose
    Would never win another.”
                         Thus the sky
    Darkened above Uraniborg, and those
    Who dwelt within it, till one evil day,
    One seeming happy day, when Tycho marked
    The seven-hundredth star upon his chart,
    Two pompous officers from Walchendorp,
    The chancellor, knocked at Tycho's eastern gate.
    “We are sent,” they said, “to see and to report
    What use you make of these estates of yours.
    Your alchemy has turned more gold to lead
    Than Denmark can approve. The uses now!
    Show us the uses of this work of yours.”
    Then Tycho showed his tables of the stars,
    Seven hundred stars, each noted in its place
    With exquisite precision, the result
    Of watching heaven for five-and-twenty years.
    “And is this all?” they said.
                         They sought to invent
    Some ground for damning him. The truth alone
    Would serve them, as it seemed. For these were men
    Who could not understand.
                         “Not all, I hope,”
    Said Tycho, “for I think, before I die,
    I shall have marked a thousand.”
                         “To what end?
    When shall we reap the fruits of all this toil?
    Show us its uses.”
                       “In the time to come,”
    Said Tycho Brahe, “perhaps a hundred years,
    Perhaps a thousand, when our own poor names
    Are quite forgotten, and our kingdoms dust,
    On one sure certain day, the torch-bearers
    Will, at some point of contact, see a light
    Moving upon this chaos. Though our eyes
    Be shut for ever in an iron sleep,
    Their eyes shall see the kingdom of the law,
    Our undiscovered cosmos. They shall see it—
    A new creation rising from the deep,
    Beautiful, whole.
                      We are like men that hear
    Disjointed notes of some supernal choir.
    Year after year, we patiently record
    All we can gather. In that far-off time,
    A people that we have not known shall hear them,
    Moving like music to a single end.”


    They could not understand: this life that sought
    Only to bear the torch and hand it on;
    And so they made report that all the dreams
    Of Tycho Brahe were fruitless; perilous, too,
    Since he avowed that any fruit they bore
    Would fall, in distant years, to alien hands.


    Little by little, Walchendorp withdrew
    His rents from Tycho Brahe, accusing him
    Of gross neglects. The Chapel at Roskilde
    Was falling into ruin. Tycho Brahe
    Was Keeper of the Bones of Oldenburg.
    He must rebuild the Chapel. All the gifts
    That Frederick gave to help him in his task,
    Were turned to stumbling-blocks; till, one dark day,
    He called his young disciples round him there,
    And in that mellow library of dreams,
    Lit by the dying sunset, poured his heart
    And mind before them, bidding them farewell.
    Through the wide-open windows as he spoke
    They heard the sorrowful whisper of the sea
    Ebbing and flowing around Uraniborg.
    “An end has come,” he said, “to all we planned.
    Uraniborg has drained her treasury dry.
    Your Alma Mater now must close her gates
    On you, her guests; on me; and, worst of all,
    On one most dear, who made this place my home.
    For you are young, your homes are all to win,
    And you would all have gone your separate ways
    In a brief while; and, though I think you love
    Your college of the skies, it could not mean
    All that it meant to those who called it 'home.'


    You that have worked with me, for one brief year,
    Will never quite forget Uraniborg.
    This room, the sunset gilding all those books,
    The star-charts and that old celestial globe,
    The long bright evenings by the winter fire,
    Of Tycho Brahe were fruitless; perilous
    The talk that opened heaven, the songs you sung,
    Yes, even, I think, the tricks you played with Jeppe,
    Will somehow, when yourselves are growing old,
    Be hallowed into beauty, touched with tears,
    For you will wish they might be yours again.


    These have been mine for five-and-twenty years,
    And more than these,—the work, the dreams I shared
    With you, and others here. My heart will break
    To leave them. But the appointed time has come
    As it must come to all men.
                         You and I
    Have watched too many constant stars to dream
    That heaven or earth, the destinies of men
    Or nations, are the sport of chance. An end
    Comes to us all through blindness, age, or death.
    If mine must come in exile, it stall find me
    Bearing the torch as far as I can bear it,
    Until I fall at the feet of the young runner,
    Who takes it from me, and carries it out of sight,
    Into the great new age I shall not know,
    Into the great new realms I must not tread.
    Come, then, swift-footed, let me see you stand
    Waiting before me, crowned with youth and joy,
    At the next turning. Take it from my hand,
    For I am almost ready now to fall.


    Something I have achieved, yes, though I say it,
    I have not loitered on that fiery way.
    And if I front the judgment of the wise
    In centuries to come, with more of dread
    Than my destroyers, it is because this work
    Will be of use, remembered and appraised,
    When all their hate is dead.
                         I say the work,
    Not the blind rumour, the glory or fame of it.
    These observations of seven hundred stars
    Are little enough in sight of those great hosts
    Which nightly wheel around us, though I hope,
    Yes, I still hope, in some more generous land
    To make my thousand up before I die.
    Little enough, I know,—a midget's work!
    The men that follow me, with more delicate art
    May add their tens of thousands; yet my sum
    Will save them just that five-and-twenty years
    Of patience, bring them sooner to their goal,
    That kingdom of the law I shall not see.
    We are on the verge of great discoveries.
    I feel them as a dreamer feels the dawn
    Before his eyes are opened. Many of you
    Will see them. In that day you will recall
    This, our last meeting at Uraniborg,
    And how I told you that this work of ours
    Would lead to victories for the coming age.
    The victors may forget us. What of that?
    Theirs be the palms, the shouting, and the praise.
    Ours be the fathers' glory in the sons.
    Ours the delight of giving, the deep joy
    Of labouring, on the cliff's face, all night long,
    Cutting them foot-holes in the solid rock,
    Whereby they climb so gaily to the heights,
    And gaze upon their new-discovered worlds.
    You will not find me there. When you descend,
    Look for me in the darkness at the foot
    Of those high cliffs, under the drifted leaves.
    That's where we hide at last, we pioneers,
    For we are very proud, and must be sought
    Before the world can find us, in our graves.
    There have been compensations. I have seen
    In darkness, more perhaps than eyes can see
    When sunlight blinds them on the mountain-tops;
    Guessed at a glory past our mortal range,
    And only mine because the night was mine.


    Of those three systems of the universe,
    The Ptolemaic, held by all the schools,
    May yet be proven false. We yet may find
    This earth of ours is not the sovran lord
    Of all those wheeling spheres. Ourselves have marked
    Movements among the planets that forbid
    Acceptance of it wholly. Some of these
    Are moving round the sun, if we can trust
    Our years of watching. There are stranger dreams.
    This radical, Copernicus, the priest,
    Of whom I often talked with you, declares
    Ail of these movements can be reconciled,
    If—a hypothesis only—we should take
    The sun itself for centre, and assume
    That this huge earth, so 'stablished, so secure
    In its foundations, is a planet also,
    And moves around the sun.
                         I cannot think it.
    This leap of thought is yet too great for me.
    I have no doubt that Ptolemy was wrong.
    Some of his planets move around the sun.
    Copernicus is nearer to the truth
    In some things. But the planets we have watched
    Still wander from the course that he assigned.
    Therefore, my system, which includes the best
    Of both, I hold may yet be proven true.
    This earth of ours, as Jeppe declared one day,
    So simply that we laughed, is 'much too big
    To move,' so let it be the centre still,
    And let the planets move around their sun;
    But let the sun with all its planets move
    Around our central earth.
                         This at the least
    Accords with all we know, and saves mankind
    From that enormous plunge into the night;
    Saves them from voyaging for ten thousand years
    Through boundless darkness without sight of land;
    Saves them from all that agony of loss,
    As one by one the beacon-fires of faith
    Are drowned in blackness.
                         I beseech you, then,
    Let me be proven wrong, before you take
    That darkness lightly. If at last you find
    The proven facts against me, take the plunge.
    Launch out into that darkness. Let the lamps
    Of heaven, the glowing hearth-fires that we knew
    Die out behind you, while the freshening wind
    Blows on your brows, and overhead you see
    The stars of truth that lead you from your home.


    I love this island,—every little glen,
    Hazel-wood, brook, and fish-pond; every bough
    And blossom in that garden; and I hoped
    To die here. But it is not chance, I know,
    That sends me wandering through the world again.
    My use perhaps is ended; and the power
    That made me, breaks me.”
                         As he spoke, they saw
    The tears upon his face. He bowed his head
    And left them silent in the darkened room.
    They saw his face no more.
                         The self-same hour,
    Tycho, Christine, and all their children, left
    Their island-home for even In their ship
    They took a few of the smaller instruments,
    And that most precious record of the stars,
    His legacy to the future. Into the night
    They vanished, leaving on the ghostly cliffs
    Only one dark, distorted, dog-like shape
    To watch them, sobbing, under its matted hair,
    “Master, have you forgotten Jeppe, your dwarf?”






    IX



    He was a great magician, Tycho Brahe,
    And yet his magic, under changing skies,
    Could never change his heart, or touch the hills
    Of those far countries with the tints of home.
    And, after many a month of wandering,
    He came to Prague; and, though with open hands
    Rodolphe received him, like an exiled king,
    A new Aeneas, exiled for the truth
    (For so they called him), none could heal the wounds
    That bled within, or lull his grief to sleep
    With that familiar whisper of the waves,
    Ebbing and flowing around Uraniborg.


    Doggedly still he laboured; point by point,
    Crept on, with aching heart and burning brain,
    Until his table of the stars had reached
    The thousand that he hoped, to crown his toil.
    But Christine heard him murmuring in the night,
    “The work, the work! Not to have lived in vain!
    Into whose hands can I entrust it all?
    I thought to find him standing by the way,
    Waiting to seize the splendour from my hand,
    The swift, young-eyed runner with the torch.
    Let me not live in vain, let me not fall
    Before I yield it to the appointed soul.”
    And yet the Power that made and broke him heard:
    For, on a certain day, to Tycho came
    Another exile, guided through the dark
    Of Europe by the starlight in his eyes,
    Or that invisible hand which guides the world.
    He asked him, as the runner with the torch
    Alone could ask, asked as a natural right
    For Tycho's hard-won life-work, those results,
    His tables of the stars. He gave his name
    Almost as one who told him, It is I;
    And yet unconscious that he told; a name
    Not famous yet, though truth had marked him out
    Already, by his exile, as her own,—
    The name of Johann Kepler.
                         “It was strange,”
    Wrote Kepler, not long after, “for I asked
    Unheard-of things, and yet he gave them to me
    As if I were his son. When first I saw him,
    We seemed to have known each other years ago
    In some forgotten world. I could not guess
    That Tycho Brahe was dying. He was quick
    Of temper, and we quarrelled now and then,
    Only to find ourselves more closely bound
    Than ever. I believe that Tycho died
    Simply of heartache for his native land.
    For though he always met me with a smile,
    Or jest upon his lips, he could not sleep
    Or work, and often unawares I caught
    Odd little whispered phrases on his lips
    As if he talked to himself, in a kind of dream.
    Yet I believe the clouds dispersed a little
    Around his death-bed, and with that strange joy
    Which comes in death, he saw the unchanging stars.
    Christine was there. She held him in her arms.
    I think, too, that he knew his work was safe.
    An hour before he died, he smiled at me,
    And whispered,—what he meant I hardly know—
    Perhaps a broken echo from the past,
    A fragment of some old familiar thought,
    And yet I seemed to know. It haunts me still:
    'Come then, swift-footed, let me see you stand,
    Waiting before me, crowned with youth and joy;
    This is the turning. Take it from my hand.
    For I am ready, ready now, to fall.'”







    III. KEPLER





    John Kepler, from the chimney corner, watched
    His wife Susannah, with her sleeves rolled back
    Making a salad in a big blue bowl.
    The thick tufts of his black rebellious hair
    Brushed into sleek submission; his trim beard
    Snug as the soft round body of a thrush
    Between the white wings of his fan-shaped ruff
    (His best, with the fine lace border) spoke of guests
    Expected; and his quick grey humorous eyes,
    His firm red whimsical pleasure-loving mouth,
    And all those elvish twinklings of his face,
    Were lit with eagerness. Only between his brows,
    Perplexed beneath that subtle load of dreams,
    Two delicate shadows brooded.
                         “What does it mean?
    Sir Henry Wotton's letter breathed a hint
    That Italy is prohibiting my book,”
    He muttered. “Then, if Austria damns it too,
    Susannah mine, we may be forced to choose
    Between the truth and exile. When he comes,
    He'll tell me more. Ambassadors, I suppose,
    Can only write in cipher, while our world
    Is steered to heaven by murderers and thieves;
    But, if he'd wrapped his friendly warnings up
    In a verse or two, I might have done more work
    These last three days, eh, Sue?”
                         “Look, John,” said she,
    “What beautiful hearts of lettuce! Tell me now
    How shall I mix it? Will your English guest
    Turn up his nose at dandelion leaves
    As crisp and young as these? They've just the tang
    Of bitterness in their milk that gives a relish
    And makes all sweet; and that's philosophy, John.
    Now—these spring onions! Would his Excellency
    Like sugared rose-leaves better?”
                         “He's a poet,
    Not an ambassador only, so I think
    He'll like a cottage salad.”
                         “A poet, John!
    I hate their arrogant little insect ways!
    I'll put a toadstool in.”
                         “Poets, dear heart,
    Can be divided into two clear kinds,—
    One that, by virtue of a half-grown brain,
    Lives in a silly world of his own making,
    A bubble, blown by himself, in which he flits
    And dizzily bombinates, chanting 'I, I, I,'
    For there is nothing in the heavens above
    Or the earth, or hell beneath, but goes to swell
    His personal pronoun. Bring him some dreadful news
    His dearest friend is burned to death,—You'll see
    The monstrous insect strike an attitude
    And shape himself into one capital I,
    A rubric, with red eyes. You'll see him use
    The coffin for his pedestal, hear him mouth
    His 'I, I, I' instructing haggard grief
    Concerning his odd ego. Does he chirp
    Of love, it's 'I, I, I' Narcissus, love,
    Myself, Narcissus, imaged in those eyes;
    For all the love-notes that he sounds are made
    After the fashion of passionate grasshoppers,
    By grating one hind-leg across another.
    Nor does he learn to sound that mellower 'You,'
    Until his bubble bursts and leaves him drowned,
    An insect in a soap-sud.
    But there's another kind, whose mind still moves
    In vital concord with the soul of things;
    So that it thinks in music, and its thoughts
    Pulse into natural song. A separate voice,
    And yet caught up by the surrounding choirs,
    There, in the harmonies of the Universe,
    Losing himself, he saves his soul alive.”
    “John, I'm afraid!”—
                         “Afraid of what, Susannah?”—
    “Afraid to put those Ducklings on to roast.
    Your friend may miss his road; and, if he's late,
    My little part of the music will be spoiled.”—
    “He won't, Susannah. Bad poets are always late.
    Good poets, at times, delay a note or two;
    But all the great are punctual as the sun.
    What's that? He's early! That's his knock, I think!”—
    “The Lord have mercy, John, there's nothing ready!
    Take him into your study and talk to him,
    Talk hard. He's come an hour before his time;
    And I've to change my dress. I'll into the kitchen!”


    Then, in a moment, all the cottage rang
    With greetings; hand grasped hand; his Excellency
    Forgot the careful prologue he'd prepared,
    And made an end of mystery. He had brought
    A message from his wisdom-loving king
    Who, hearing of new menaces to the light
    In Europe, urged the illustrious Kepler now
    To make his home in England. There, his thought
    And speech would both be free.
                         “My friend,” said Wotton,
    “I have moved in those old strongholds of the night,
    And heard strange mutterings. It is not many years
    Since Bruno burned. There's trouble brewing too,
    For one you know, I think,—the Florentine
    Who made that curious optic tube.”—
                         “You mean
    The man at Padua, Galileo?”—
                         “Yes.”
    “They will not dare or need. Proof or disproof
    Rests with their eyes.”—
                         “Kepler, have you not heard
    Of those who, fifteen hundred years ago,
    Had eyes and would not see? Eyes quickly close
    When souls prefer the dark.”—
    “So be it. Other and younger eyes will see.
    Perhaps that's why God gave the young a spice
    Of devilry. They'll go look, while elders gasp;
    And, when the Devil and Truth go hand in hand,
    God help their enemies. You will send my thanks,
    My grateful thanks, Sir Henry, to your king.
    To-day I cannot answer you. I must think.
    It would be very difficult My wife
    Would find it hard to leave her native land.
    Say nothing yet before her.”
                         Then, to hide
    Their secret from Susannah, Kepler poured
    His mind out, and the world's dead branches bloomed.
    For, when he talked, another spring began
    To which our May was winter; and, in the boughs
    Of his delicious thoughts, like feathered choirs,
    Bits of old rhyme, scraps from the Sabine farm,
    Celestial phrases from the Shepherd King,
    And fluttering morsels from Catullus sang.
    Much was fantastic. All was touched with light
    That only genius knows to steal from heaven.
    He spoke of poetry, as the “flowering time
    Of knowledge,” called it “thought in passionate tune
    With those great rhythms that steer the moon and sun;
    Thought in such concord with the soul of things
    That it can only move, like tides and stars,
    And man's own beating heart, and the wings of birds,
    In law, whose service only sets them free.”
    Therefore it often leaps to the truth we seek,
    Clasping it, as a lover clasps his bride
    In darkness, ere the sage can light his lamp.
    And so, in music, men might find the road
    To truth, at many a point, where sages grope.
    One day, a greater Plato would arise
    To write a new philosophy, he said,
    Showing how music is the golden clue
    To all the windings of the world's dark maze.
    Himself had used it, partly proved it, too,
    In his own book,—the Harmonies of the World.
    'All that the years discover points one way
    To this great ordered harmony,” he said,
    “Revealed on earth by music. Planets move
    In subtle accord like notes of one great song
    Audible only to the Artificer,
    The Eternal Artist. There's no grief, no pain,
    But music—follow it simply as a clue,
    A microcosmic pattern of the whole—
    Can show you, somewhere in its golden scheme,
    The use of all such discords; and, at last,
    Their exquisite solution. Then darkness breaks
    Into diviner light, love's agony climbs
    Through death to life, and evil builds up heaven.
    Have you not heard, in some great symphony,
    Those golden mathematics making clear
    The victory of the soul? Have you not heard
    The very heavens opening?
                         Do those fools
    Who thought me an infidel then, still smile at me
    For trying to read the stars in terms of song,
    Discern their orbits, measure their distances,
    By musical proportions? Let them smile,
    My folly at least revealed those three great laws;
    Gave me the golden vases of the Egyptians,
    To set in the great new temple of my God
    Beyond the bounds of Egypt.
                         They will forget
    My methods, doubtless, as the years go by,
    And the world's wisdom shuts its music out.
    The dust will gather on all my harmonies;
    Or scholars turn my pages listlessly,
    Glance at the musical phrases, and pass on,
    Not troubling even to read one Latin page.
    Yet they'll accept those great results as mine.
    I call them mine. How can I help exulting,
    Who climbed my ladder of music to the skies
    And found, by accident, let them call it so,
    Or by the inspiration of that Power
    Which built His world of music, those three laws:—
    First, how the speed of planets round the sun
    Bears a proportion, beautifully precise
    As music, to their silver distances;
    Next, that although they seem to swerve aside
    From those plain circles of old Copernicus
    Their paths were not less rhythmical and exact,
    But followed always that most exquisite curve
    In its most perfect form, the pure ellipse;
    Third, that although their speed from point to point
    Appeared to change, their radii always moved
    Through equal fields of space in equal times.
    Was this my infidelity, was this
    Less full of beauty, less divine in truth,
    Than their dull chaos? You, the poet will know
    How, as those dark perplexities grew clear,
    And old anomalous discords changed to song,
    My whole soul bowed and cried, Almighty God
    These are Thy thoughts, I am thinking after Thee!

    I hope that Tycho knows. I owed so much
    To Tycho Brahe; for it was he who built
    The towers from which I hailed those three great laws.
    How strange and far away it all seems now.
    The thistles grow upon that little isle
    Where Tycho's great Uraniborg once was.
    Yet, for a few sad years, before it fell
    Into decay and ruin, there was one
    Who crept about its crumbling corridors,
    And lit the fire of memory on its hearth.”—
    Wotton looked quickly up, “I think I have heard
    Something of that. You mean poor Jeppe, his dwarf.
    Fynes Moryson, at the Mermaid Inn one night
    Showed a most curious manuscript, a scrawl
    On yellow parchment, crusted here and there
    With sea-salt, or the salt of those thick tears
    Creatures like Jeppe, the crooked dwarf, could weep.
    It had been found, clasped in a crooked hand,
    Under the cliffs of Wheen, a crooked hand
    That many a time had beckoned to passing ships,
    Hoping to find some voyager who would take
    A letter to its master.
                         The sailors laughed
    And jeered at him, till Jeppe threw stones at them.
    And now Jeppe, too, was dead, and one who knew
    Fynes Moryson, had found him, and brought home
    That curious crooked scrawl. Fynes Englished it
    Out of its barbarous Danish. Thus it ran:
    'Master, have you forgotten Jeppe, your dwarf,
    Who used to lie beside the big log-fire
    And feed from your own hand? The hall is dark,
    There are no voices now,—only the wind
    And the sea-gulls crying round Uraniborg.
    I too am crying, Master, even I,
    Because there is no fire upon the hearth,
    No light in any window. It is night,
    And all the faces that I knew are gone.


    Master, I watched you leaving us. I saw
    The white sails dwindling into sea-gull's wings,
    Then melting into foam, and all was dark.
    I lay among the wild flowers on the cliff
    And dug my nails into the stiff white chalk
    And called you, Tycho Brahe. You did not hear;
    But gulls and jackdaws, wheeling round my head,
    Mocked me with Tycho Brahe, and Tycho Brahe!


    You were a great magician, Tycho Brahe;
    And, now that they have driven you away,
    I, that am only Jeppe,—the crooked dwarf,
    You used to laugh at for his matted hair,
    And head too big and heavy—take your pen
    Here in your study. I will write it down
    And send it by a sailor to the King
    Of Scotland, and who knows, the mouse that gnawed
    The lion free, may save you, Tycho Brahe.'“
    “He is free now,” said Kepler, “had he lived
    He would have sent for Jeppe to join him there
    At Prague. But death forestalled him, and your King.
    The years in which he watched that planet Mars,
    His patient notes and records, all were mine;
    And, mark you, had he clipped or trimmed one fact
    By even a hair's-breadth, so that his results
    Made a pure circle of that planet's path
    It might have baffled us for an age and drowned
    All our new light in darkness. But he held
    To what he saw. He might so easily,
    So comfortably have said, 'My instruments
    Are crude and fallible. In so fine a point
    Eyes may have erred, too. Why not acquiesce?
    Why mar the tune, why dislocate a world,
    For one slight clash of seeming fact with faith?'
    But no, though stars might swerve, he held his course,
    Recording only what his eyes could see
    Until death closed them.
                         Then, to his results,
    I added mine and saw, in one wild gleam,
    Strange as the light of day to one born blind,
    A subtler concord ruling them and heard
    Profounder tones of harmony resolve
    Those broken melodies into song again.”—
    “Faintly and far away, I, too, have seen
    In music, and in verse, that golden clue
    Whereof you speak,” said Wotton. “In all true song,
    There is a hidden logic. Even the rhyme
    That, in bad poets, wrings the neck of thought,
    Is like a subtle calculus to the true,
    An instrument of discovery. It reveals
    New harmonies, new analogies. It links
    Far things and near, not in unnatural chains,
    But in those true accords which still escape
    The plodding reason, yet unify the world.
    I caught some glimpses of this mystic power
    In verses of your own, that elegy
    On Tycho, and that great quatrain of yours—
    I cannot quite recall the Latin words,
    But made it roughly mine in words like these:


    'I know that I am dust, and daily die;
      Yet, as I trace those rhythmic spheres at night,
    I stand before the Thunderer's throne on high
      And feast on nectar in the halls of light.'


    My version lacks the glory of your lines
    But...”
            “Mine too was a version,”
      Kepler laughed,
    “Turned into Latin from old Ptolemy's Greek;
    For, even in verse, half of the joy, I think,
    Is just to pass the torch from hand to hand
    An undimmed splendour. But, last night, I tried
    Some music all my own. I had a dream
    That I was wandering in some distant world.
    I have often dreamed it Once it was the moon.
    I wrote that down in prose. When I am dead,
    It may be printed. This was a fairer dream:
    For I was walking in a far-off spring
    Upon the planet, Venus. Only verse
    Could spread true wings for that delicious world;
    And so I wrote it—for no eyes but mine,
    Or 'twould be seized on, doubtless, as fresh proof
    Of poor old Kepler's madness.”—
                         “Let me hear,
    Madman to madman; for I, too, write verse.”
    Then Kepler, in a rhythmic murmur, breathed
    His rich enchanted memories of that dream:


    “Beauty burned before me
       Swinging a lanthorn through that fragrant night.
     I followed a distant singing,
       And a dreaming light
     How she led me, I cannot tell
       To that strange world afar,
     Nor how I walked, in that wild glen
       Upon the sunset star.


     Winged creatures floated
       Under those rose-red boughs of violet bloom,
     With delicate forms unknown on Earth
       'Twixt irised plume and plume;
     Human-hearted, angel-eyed,
       And crowned with unknown flowers;
     For nothing in that enchanted world
       Followed the way of ours.


     Only I saw that Beauty,
       On Hesper, as on earth, still held command;
     And though, as one in slumber,
       I roamed that radiant land,
     With all these earth-born senses sealed
       To what the Hesperians knew,
     The faithful lanthorn of her law
       Was mine on Hesper too.


     Then, half at home with wonder,
       I saw strange flocks of flowers like birds take flight;
     Great trees that burned like opals
       To lure their loves at night;
     Dark beings that could move in realms
       No dream of ours has known.
     Till these became as common things
       As men account their own.


     Yet, when that lanthorn led me
       Back to the world where once I thought me wise;
     I saw, on this my planet,
       What souls, with awful eyes.
     Hardly I dared to walk her fields
       As in that strange re-birth
     I looked on those wild miracles
       The birds and flowers of earth.”


    Silence a moment held them, loth to break
    The spell of that strange dream,
                         “One proof the more"
    Said Wotton at last, “that songs can mount and fly
    To truth; for this fantastic vision of yours
    Of life in other spheres, awakes in me,
    Either that slumbering knowledge of Socrates,
    Or some strange premonition that the years
    Will prove it true. This music leads us far
    From all our creeds, except that faith in law.
    Your quest for knowledge—how it rests on that!
    How sure the soul is that if truth destroy
    The temple, in three days the truth will build
    A nobler temple; and that order reigns
    In all things. Even your atheist builds his doubt
    On that strange faith; destroys his heaven and God
    In absolute faith that his own thought is true
    To law, God's lanthorn to our stumbling feet;
    And so, despite himself, he worships God,
    For where true souls are, there are God and heaven.”—


    “It is an ancient wisdom. Long ago,”
    Said Kepler, “under the glittering Eastern sky,
    The shepherd king looked up at those great stars,
    Those ordered hosts, and cried Caeli narrant
    Gloriam Dei!

                     Though there be some to-day
    Who'd ape Lucretius, and believe themselves
    Epicureans, little they know of him
    Who, even in utter darkness, bowed his head,
    To something nobler than the gods of Rome
    Reigning beyond the darkness.
                         They accept
    The law, the music of these ordered worlds;
    And straight deny the law's first postulate,
    That out of nothingness nothing can be born,
    Nor greater things from less. Can music rise
    By chance from chaos, as they said that star
    In Serpentarius rose? I told them, then,
    That when I was a boy, with time to spare,
    I played at anagrams. Out of my Latin name
    Johannes Keplerus came that sinister phrase
    Serpens in akuleo. Struck by this,
    I tried again, but trusted it to chance.
    I took some playing cards, and wrote on each
    One letter of my name. Then I began
    To shuffle them; and, at every shuffle, I read
    The letters, in their order, as they came,
    To see what meaning chance might give to them.
    Wotton, the gods and goddesses must have laughed
    To see the weeks I lost in studying chance;
    For had I scattered those cards into the black
    Epicurean eternity, I'll swear
    They'd still be playing at leap-frog in the dark,
    And show no glimmer of sense. And yet—to hear
    Those wittols talk, you'd think you'd but to mix
    A bushel of good Greek letters in a sack
    And shake them roundly for an age or so,
    To pour the Odyssey out.
                         At last, I told,
    Those disputants what my wife had said. One night
    When I was tired and all my mind a-dust
    With pondering on their atoms, I was called
    To supper, and she placed before me there
    A most delicious salad. 'It would appear,'
    I thought aloud, 'that if these pewter dishes,
    Green hearts of lettuce, tarragon, slips of thyme,
    Slices of hard boiled egg, and grains of salt.
    With drops of water, vinegar and oil,
    Had in a bottomless gulf been flying about
    From all eternity, one sure certain day
    The sweet invisible hand of Happy Chance
    Would serve them as a salad.'
                         'Likely enough,'
    My wife replied, 'but not so good as mine,
    Nor so well dressed.'“
                         They laughed. Susannah's voice
    Broke in, “I've made a better one. The receipt
    Came from the Golden Lion. I have dished
    Ducklings and peas and all. Come, John, say grace.”






    IV. GALILEO





    I



    (Celeste, in the Convent at Arcetri, writes to her old lover at
    Rome.
    )


    My friend, my dearest friend, my own dear love,
    I, who am dead to love, and see around me
    The funeral tapers lighted, send this cry
    Out of my heart to yours, before the end.
    You told me once you would endure the rack
    To save my heart one pang. O, save it now!
    Last night there came a dreadful word from Rome
    For my dear lord and father, summoning him
    Before the inquisitors there, to take his trial
    At threescore years and ten. There is a threat
    Of torture, if his lips will not deny
    The truth his eyes have seen.
                         You know my father,
    You know me, too. You never will believe
    That he and I are enemies of the faith.
    Could I, who put away all earthly love,
    Deny the Cross to which I nailed this flesh?
    Could he, who, on the night when all those heavens
    Opened above us, with their circling worlds,
    Knelt with me, crushed beneath that weight of glory,
    Forget the Maker of that glory now?
    You'll not believe it. Neither would the Church,
    Had not his enemies poisoned all the springs
    And fountain-heads of truth. It is not Rome
    That summons him, but Magini, Sizy, Scheiner,
    Lorini, all the blind, pedantic crew
    That envy him his fame, and hate his works
    For dwarfing theirs.
                         Must such things always be
    When truth is born?
    Only five nights ago we walked together,
    My father and I, here in the Convent garden;
    And, as the dusk turned everything to dreams,
    We dreamed together of his work well done
    And happiness to be. We did not dream
    That even then, muttering above his book,
    His enemies, those enemies whom the truth
    Stings into hate, were plotting to destroy him.
    Yet something shadowed him. I recall his words—
    “The grapes are ripening. See, Celeste, how black
    And heavy. We shall have good wine this year,”—
    “Yes, all grows ripe,” I said, “your life-work, too,
    Dear father. Are you happy now to know
    Your book is printed, and the new world born?”
    He shook his head, a little sadly, I thought.
    “Autumn's too full of endings. Fruits grow ripe
    And fall, and then comes winter.”
                         “Not for you!
    Never,” I said, “for those who write their names
    In heaven. Think, father, through all ages now
    No one can ever watch that starry sky
    Without remembering you. Your fame ...”
                         And there
    He stopped me, laid his hand upon my arm,
    And standing in the darkness with dead leaves
    Drifting around him, and his bare grey head
    Bowed in complete humility, his voice
    Shaken and low, he said like one in prayer,
    “Celeste, beware of that. Say truth, not fame.
    If there be any happiness on earth,
    It springs from truth alone, the truth we live
    In act and thought. I have looked up there and seen
    Too many worlds to talk of fame on earth.
    Fame, on this grain of dust among the stars,
    The trumpet of a gnat that thinks to halt
    The great sun-clusters moving on their way
    In silence! Yes, that's fame, but truth, Celeste,
    Truth and its laws are constant, even up there;
    That's where one man may face and fight the world.
    His weakness turns to strength. He is made one
    With universal forces, and he holds
    The password to eternity.
    Gate after gate swings back through all the heavens.
    No sentry halts him, and no flaming sword.
    Say truth, Celeste, not fame.”
                         “No, for I'll say
    A better word,” I told him. “I'll say love.”
    He took my face between his hands and said—
    His face all dark between me and the stars—
    “What's love, Celeste, but this dear face of truth
    Upturned to heaven.”
                         He left me, and I heard,
    Some twelve hours later, that this man whose soul
    Was dedicate to Truth, was threatened now
    With torture, if his lips did not deny
    The truth he loved.
                        I tell you all these things
    Because to help him, you must understand him;
    And even you may doubt him, if you hear
    Only those plausible outside witnesses
    Who never heard his heart-beats as have I.
    So let me tell you all—his quest for truth,
    And how this hate began.
                         Even from the first,
    He made his enemies of those almost-minds
    Who chanced upon some new thing in the dark
    And could not see its meaning, for he saw,
    Always, the law illumining it within.
    So when he heard of that strange optic-glass
    Which brought the distance near, he thought it out
    By reason, where that other hit upon it
    Only by chance. He made his telescope;
    And O, how vividly that day comes back,
    When in their gorgeous robes the Senate stood
    Beside him on that high Venetian tower,
    Scanning the bare blue sea that showed no speck
    Of sail. Then, one by one, he bade them look;
    And one by one they gasped, “a miracle.”
    Brown sails and red, a fleet of fishing boats,
    See how the bright foam bursts around their bows!
    See how the bare-legged sailors walk the decks!
    Then, quickly looking up, as if to catch
    The vision, ere it tricked them, all they saw
    Was empty sea again.
                         Many believed
    That all was trickery, but he bade them note
    The colours of the boats, and count their sails.
    Then, in a little while, the naked eye
    Saw on the sky-line certain specks that grew,
    Took form and colour; and, within an hour,
    Their magic fleet came foaming into port.
    Whereat old senators, wagging their white beards,
    And plucking at golden chains with stiff old claws
    Too feeble for the sword-hilt, squeaked at once:
    “This glass will give us great advantages
    In time of war.”
                     War, war, O God of love,
    Even amidst their wonder at Thy world,
    Dazed with new beauty, gifted with new powers,
    These old men dreamed of blood. This was the thought
    To which all else must pander, if he hoped
    Even for one hour to see those dull eyes blaze
    At his discoveries.
                        “Wolves,” he called them, “wolves”;
    And yet he humoured them. He stooped to them.
    Promised them more advantages, and talked
    As elders do to children. You may call it
    Weakness, and yet could any man do more,
    Alone, against a world, with such a trust
    To guard for future ages? All his life
    He has had some weanling truth to guard, has fought
    Desperately to defend it, taking cover
    Wherever he could, behind old fallen trees
    Of superstition, or ruins of old thought.
    He has read horoscopes to keep his work
    Among the stars in favour with his prince,
    I tell you this that you may understand
    What seems inconstant in him. It may be
    That he was wrong in these things, and must pay
    A dreadful penalty. But you must explore
    His mind's great ranges, plains and lonely peaks
    Before you know him, as I know him now.
    How could he talk to children, but in words
    That children understand? Have not some said
    That God Himself has made His glory dark
    For men to bear it. In his human sphere
    My father has done this.
                         War was the dream
    That filmed those old men's eyes. They did not hear
    My father, when he hinted at his hope
    Of opening up the heavens for mankind
    With that new power of bringing far things near.
    My heart burned as I heard him; but they blinked
    Like owls at noonday. Then I saw him turn,
    Desperately, to humour them, from thoughts
    Of heaven to thoughts of warfare.
                         Late that night
    My own dear lord and father came to me
    And whispered, with a glory in his face
    As one who has looked on things too beautiful
    To breathe aloud, “Come out, Celeste, and see
    A miracle.”
                I followed him. He showed me,
    Looking along his outstretched hand, a star,
    A point of light above our olive-trees.
    It was the star called Jupiter. And then
    He bade me look again, but through his glass.
    I feared to look at first, lest I should see
    Some wonder never meant for mortal eyes.
    He too, had felt the same, not fear, but awe,
    As if his hand were laid upon the veil
    Between this world and heaven.
                         Then . . . I, too, saw,
    Small as the smallest bead of mist that clings
    To a spider's thread at dawn, the floating disk
    Of what had been a star, a planet now,
    And near it, with no disk that eyes could see,
    Four needle-points of light, unseen before.
    “The moons of Jupiter,” he whispered low,
    “I have watched them as they moved, from night to night;
    A system like our own, although the world
    Their fourfold lights and shadows make so strange
    Must—as I think—be mightier than we dreamed,
    A Titan planet. Earth begins to fade
    And dwindle; yes, the heavens are opening now.
    Perhaps up there, this night, some lonely soul
    Gazes at earth, watches our dawning moon,
    And wonders, as we wonder.”
                         In that dark
    We knelt together . . .
                         Very strange to see
    The vanity and fickleness of princes.
    Before his enemies had provoked the wrath
    Of Rome against him, he had given the name
    Of Medicean stars to those four moons
    In honour of Prince Cosmo. This aroused
    The court of France to seek a lasting place
    Upon the map of heaven. A letter came
    Beseeching him to find another star
    Even more brilliant, and to call it Henri
    After the reigning and most brilliant prince
    Of France. They did not wish the family name
    Of Bourbon. This would dissipate the glory.
    No, they preferred his proper name of Henri.
    We read it together in the garden here,
    Weeping with laughter, never dreaming then
    That this, this, this, could stir the little hearts
    Of men to envy.
                    O, but afterwards,
    The blindness of the men who thought themselves
    His enemies. The men who never knew him,
    The men that had set up a thing of straw
    And called it by his name, and wished to burn
    Their image and himself in one wild fire.
    Men? Were they men or children? They refused
    Even to look through Galileo's glass,
    Lest seeing might persuade them. Even that sage,
    That great Aristotelian, Julius Libri,
    Holding his breath there, like a fractious child
    Until his cheeks grew purple, and the veins
    Were bursting on his brow, swore he would die
    Sooner than look.
                      And that poor monstrous babe
    Not long thereafter, kept his word and died,
    Died of his own pent rage, as I have heard.
    Whereat my lord and father shook his head
    And, smiling, somewhat sadly—oh, you know
    That smile of his, more deadly to the false
    Than even his reasoning—murmured, “Libri, dead,
    Who called the moons of Jupiter absurd!
    He swore he would not look at them from earth,
    I hope he saw them on his way to heaven.”

    Welser in Augsburg, Clavius at Rome,
    Scoffed at the fabled moons of Jupiter,
    It was a trick, they said. He had made a glass
    To fool the world with false appearances.
    Perhaps the lens was flawed. Perhaps his wits
    Were wandering. Anything rather than the truth
    Which might disturb the mighty in their seat.
    “Let Galileo hold his own opinions.
    I, Clavius, will hold mine.”
                         He wrote to Kepler;
    “You, Kepler, are the first, whose open mind
    And lofty genius could accept for truth
    The things which I have seen. With you for friend,
    The abuse of the multitude will not trouble me.
    Jupiter stands in heaven and will stand,
    Though all the sycophants bark at him.
                         In Pisa,
    Florence, Bologna, Venice, Padua,
    Many have seen the moons. These witnesses
    Are silent and uncertain. Do you wonder?
    Most of them could not, even when they saw them,
    Distinguish Mars from Jupiter. Shall we side
    With Heraclitus or Democritus?
    I think, my Kepler, we will only laugh
    At this immeasurable stupidity.
    Picture the leaders of our college here.
    A thousand times I have offered them the proof
    Of their own eyes. They sleep here, like gorged snakes,
    Refusing even to look at planets, moons,
    Or telescope. They think philosophy
    Is all in books, and that the truth is found
    Neither in nature, nor the Universe,
    But in comparing texts. How you would laugh
    Had you but heard our first philosopher
    Before the Grand Duke, trying to tear down
    And argue the new planets out of heaven,
    Now by his own weird logic and closed eyes
    And now by magic spells.”
                         How could he help
    Despising them a little? It's an error
    Even for a giant to despise a midge;
    For, when the giant reels beneath some stroke
    Of fate, the buzzing clouds will swoop upon him,
    Cluster and feed upon his bleeding wounds,
    And do what midges can to sting him blind.
    These human midges have not missed their chance.
    They have missed no smallest spot upon that sun.
    My mother was not married—they have found—
    To my dear father. All his children, then,
    And doubtless all their thoughts are evil, too;
    But who that judged him ever sought to know
    Whether, as evil sometimes wears the cloak
    Of virtue, nobler virtue in this man
    Might wear that outward semblance of a sin?
    Yes, even you who love me, may believe
    These thoughts are born of my own tainted heart;
    And yet I write them, kneeling in my cell
    And whisper them to One who blesses me
    Here, from His Cross, upon the bare grey wall.
    So, if you love me, bless me also, you,
    By helping him. Make plain to all you meet
    What part his enemies have played in this.
    How some one, somehow, altered the command
    Laid on him all those years ago, by Rome,
    So that it reads to-day as if he vowed
    Never to think or breathe that this round earth
    Moves with its sister-planets round the sun.
    'Tis true he promised not to write or speak
    As if this truth were 'stablished equally
    With God's eternal laws; and so he wrote
    His Dialogues, reasoning for it, and against,
    And gave the last word to Simplicio,
    Saying that human reason must bow down
    Before the power of God.
                         And even this
    His enemies have twisted to a sneer
    Against the Pope, and cunningly declared
    Simplicio to be Urban.
                         Why, my friend,
    There were three dolphins on the titlepage,
    Each with the tail of another in its mouth.
    The censor had not seen this, and they swore
    It held some hidden meaning. Then they found
    The same three dolphins sprawled on all the books
    Landini printed at his Florence press.
    They tried another charge.
                         I am not afraid
    Of any truth that they can bring against him;
    But, O, my friend, I more than fear their lies.
    I do not fear the justice of our God;
    But I do fear the vanity of men;
    Even of Urban; not His Holiness,
    But Urban, the weak man, who may resent,
    And in resentment rush half-way to meet
    This cunning lie with credence. Vanity!
    O, half the wrongs on earth arise from that!
    Greed, and war's pomp, all envy, and most hate,
    Are born of that; while one dear humble heart,
    Beating with love for man, between two thieves,
    Proves more than all His wounds and miracles
    Our Crucified to be the Son of God.
    Say that I long to see him; that my prayers
    Knock at the gates of mercy, night and day.
    Urge him to leave the judgment now with God
    And strive no more.
                        If he be right, the stars
    Fight for him in their courses. Let him bow
    His poor, dishonoured, glorious, old grey head
    Before this storm, and then come home to me.
    O, quickly, or I fear 'twill be too late;
    For I am dying. Do not tell him this;
    But I must live to hold his hands again,
    And know that he is safe.
    I dare not leave him, helpless and half blind,
    Half father and half child, to rack and cord.
    By all the Christ within you, save him, you;
    And, though you may have ceased to love me now,
    One faithful shadow in your own last hour
    Shall watch beside you till all shadows die,
    And heaven unfold to bless you where I failed.






    II



    (Scheiner writes to Castelli, after the Trial.)


    What think you of your Galileo now,
    Your hero that like Ajax should defy
    The lightning? Yesterday I saw him stand
    Trembling before our court of Cardinals,
    Trembling before the colour of their robes
    As sheep, before the slaughter, at the sight
    And smell of blood. His lips could hardly speak,
    And—mark you—neither rack, nor cord had touched him.
    Out of the Inquisition's five degrees
    Of rigor: first, the public threat of torture;
    Second, the repetition of the threat
    Within the torture-chamber, where we show
    The instruments of torture to the accused;
    Third, the undressing and the binding; fourth,
    Laying him on the rack; then, fifth and last,
    Torture, territio realis; out of these,
    Your Galileo reached the second only,
    When, clapping both his hands against his sides,
    He whined about a rupture that forbade
    These extreme courses. Great heroic soul
    Dropped like a cur into a sea of terror,
    He sank right under. Then he came up gasping,
    Ready to swear, deny, abjure, recant,
    Anything, everything! Foolish, weak, old man,
    Who had been so proud of his discoveries,
    And dared to teach his betters. How we grinned
    To see him kneeling there and whispering, thus,
    Through his white lips, bending his old grey head:
    “I, Galileo Galilei, born
    A Florentine, now seventy years of age,
    Kneeling before you, having before mine eyes,
    And touching with my hands the Holy Gospels,
    Swear that I always have believed, do now,
    And always will believe what Holy Church
    Has held and preached and taught me to believe;
    And now, whereas I rightly am accused,
    Of heresy, having falsely held the sun
    To be the centre of our Universe,
    And also that this earth is not the centre,
    But moves;
    I most illogically desire
    Completely to expunge this dark suspicion,
    So reasonably conceived. I now abjure,
    Detest and curse these errors; and I swear
    That should I know another, friend or foe,
    Holding the selfsame heresy as myself,
    I will denounce him to the Inquisitor
    In whatsoever place I chance to be.
    So help me God, and these His Holy Gospels,
    Which with my hands I touch!”

                         You will observe
    His promise to denounce. Beware, Castelli!
    What think you of your Galileo now?






    III



    (Castelli writes, enclosing Schemer's letter, to Campanella.)


    What think I? This,—that he has laid his hands
    Like Samson on the pillars of our world,
    And one more trembling utterance such as this
    Will overwhelm us all.
                         O, Campanella,
    You know that I am loyal to our faith,
    As Galileo too has always been.
    You know that I believe, as he believes,
    In the one Catholic Apostolic Church;
    Yet there are many times when I could wish
    That some blind Samson would indeed tear down
    All this proud temporal fabric, made with hands,
    And that, once more, we suffered with our Lord,
    Were persecuted, crucified with Him.
    I tell you, Campanella, on that day
    When Galileo faced our Cardinals,
    A veil was rent for me. There, in one flash,
    I saw the eternal tragedy, transformed
    Into new terms. I saw the Christ once more,
    Before the court of Pilate. Peter there
    Denied Him once again; and, as for me,
    Never has all my soul so humbly knelt
    To God in Christ, as when that sad old man
    Bowed his grey head, and knelt—at seventy years—
    To acquiesce, and shake the world with shame.
    He shall not strive or cry! Strange, is it not,
    How nearly Scheiner—even amidst his hate—
    Quoted the Prophets? Do we think this world
    So greatly bettered, that the ancient cry,
    Despised, rejected,” hails our God no more?






    IV



    (Celeste writes to her father in his imprisonment at Siena.)


    Dear father, it will seem a thousand years
    Until I see you home again and well.
    I would not have you doubt that all this time
    I have prayed for you continually. I saw
    A copy of your sentence. I was grieved;
    And yet it gladdened me, for I found a way
    To be of use, by taking on myself
    Your penance. Therefore, if you fail in this,
    If you forget it—and indeed, to save you
    The trouble of remembering it—your child
    Will do it for you.
                        Ah, could she do more!
    How willingly would your Celeste endure
    A straiter prison than she lives in now
    To set you free.
                     “A prison,” I have said;
    And yet, if you were here, 'twould not be so.
    When you were pent in Rome, I used to say,
    “Would he were at Siena!” God fulfilled
    That wish. You are at Siena; and I now say
    Would he were at Arcctri.
                         So perhaps
    Little by little, angels can be wooed
    Each day, by some new prayer of mine or yours,
    To bring you wholly back to me, and save
    Some few of the flying days that yet remain.
    You see, these other Nuns have each their friend,
    Their patron Saint, their ever near devoto,
    To whom they tell their joys and griefs; but I
    Have only you, dear father, and if you
    Were only near me, I could want no more.
    Your garden looks as if it missed your love.
    The unpruned branches lean against the wall
    To look for you. The walks run wild with flowers.
    Even your watch-tower seems to wait for you;
    And, though the fruit is not so good this year
    (The vines were hurt by hail, I think, and thieves
    Have climbed the wall too often for the pears),
    The crop of peas is good, and only waits
    Your hand to gather it.
                         In the dovecote, too,
    You'll find some plump young pigeons. We must make
    A feast for your return.
                         In my small plot,
    Here at the Convent, better watched than yours,
    I raised a little harvest. With the price
    I got for it, I had three Masses said
    For my dear father's sake.






    V



    (Galileo writes to his friend Castelli, after his return to
    Arcetri.)


    Castelli, O Castelli, she is dead.
    I found her driving death back with her soul
    Till I should come.
                        I could not even see
    Her face.—These useless eyes had spent their power
    On distant worlds, and lost that last faint look
    Of love on earth.
                      I am in the dark, Castelli,
    Utterly and irreparably blind.
    The Universe which once these outworn eyes
    Enlarged so far beyond its ancient bounds
    Is henceforth shrunk into that narrow space
    Which I myself inhabit.
                         Yet I found
    Even in the dark, her tears against my face,
    Her thin soft childish arms around my neck,
    And her voice whispering ... love, undying love;
    Asking me, at this last, to tell her true,
    If we should meet again.
                         Her trust in me
    Had shaken her faith in what my judges held;
    And, as I felt her fingers clutch my hand,
    Like a child drowning, “Tell me the truth,” she said,
    “Before I lose the light of your dear face”—
    It seemed so strange that dying she could see me
    While I had lost her,—“tell me, before I go.”
    “Believe in Love,” was all my soul could breathe.
    I heard no answer. Only I felt her hand
    Clasp mine and hold it tighter. Then she died,
    And left me to my darkness. Could I guess
    At unseen glories, in this deeper night,
    Make new discoveries of profounder realms,
    Within the soul? O, could I find Him there,
    Rise to Him through His harmonies of law
    And make His will my own!
                         This much, at least,
    I know already, that—in some strange way—
    His law implies His love; for, failing that
    All grows discordant, and the primal Power
    Ignobler than His children.
                         So I trust
    One day to find her, waiting for me still,
    When all things are made new.
                         I raise this torch
    Of knowledge. It is one with my right hand,
    And the dark sap that keeps it burning flows
    Out of my heart; and yet, for all my faith,
    It shows me only darkness.
                         Was I wrong?
    Did I forget the subtler truth of Rome
    And, in my pride, obscure the world's one light?
    Did I subordinate to this moving earth
    Our swiftlier-moving God?
                         O, my Celeste,
    Once, once at least, you knew far more than I;
    And she is dead, Castelli, she is dead.






    VI



    (Viviani, many years later, writes to a friend in England)


    I was his last disciple, as you say
    I went to him, at seventeen years of age,
    And offered him my hands and eyes to use,
    When, voicing the true mind and heart of Rome,
    Father Castelli, his most faithful friend,
    Wrote, for my master, that compassionate plea;
    The noblest eye that Nature ever made
    Is darkened; one so exquisitely dowered,
    So delicate in power that it beheld
    More than all other eyes in ages gone
    And opened the eyes of all that are to come.

    But, out of England, even then, there shone
    The first ethereal promise of light
    That crowns my master dead. Well I recall
    That day of days. There was no faintest breath
    Among his garden cypress-trees. They dreamed
    Dark, on a sky too beautiful for tears,
    And the first star was trembling overhead,
    When, quietly as a messenger from heaven,
    Moving unseen, through his own purer realm,
    Amongst the shadows of our mortal world,
    A young man, with a strange light on his face
    Knocked at the door of Galileo's house.
    His name was Milton.
                         By the hand of God,
    He, the one living soul on earth with power
    To read the starry soul of this blind man,
    Was led through Italy to his prison door.
    He looked on Galileo, touched his hand ...
    O, dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
    Irrecoverably dark ....
                         In after days,
    He wrote it; but it pulsed within him then;
    And Galileo rising to his feet
    And turning on him those unseeing eyes
    That had searched heaven and seen so many worlds,
    Said to him, “You have found me.”
    Often he told me in those last sad months
    Of how your grave young island poet brought
    Peace to him, with the knowledge that, far off,
    In other lands, the truth he had proclaimed
    Was gathering power.
                         Soon after, death unlocked
    His prison, and the city that he loved,
    Florence, his town of flowers, whose gates in life
    He was forbid to pass, received him dead.


    You write to me from England, that his name
    Is now among the mightiest in the world,
    And in his name I thank you.
                         I am old;
    And I was very young when, long ago,
    I stood beside his poor dishonoured grave
    Where hate denied him even an epitaph;
    And I have seen, slowly and silently,
    His purer fame arising, like a moon
    In marble on the twilight of those aisles
    At Santa Croce, where the dread decree
    Was read against him.
                         Now, against two wrongs,
    Let me defend two victims: first, the Church
    Whom many have vilified for my master's doom;
    And second, Galileo, whom they reproach
    Because they think that in his blind old age
    He might with one great eagle's glance have cowed
    His judges, played the hero, raised his hands
    Above his head, and posturing like a mummer
    Cried (as one empty rumour now declares)
    After his recantation—yet, it moves!
    Out of this wild confusion, fourfold wrongs
    Are heaped on both sides.—I would fain bring peace,
    The peace of truth to both before I die;
    And, as I hope, rest at my master's feet.
    It was not Rome that tried to murder truth;
    But the blind hate and vanity of man.
    Had Galileo but concealed the smile
    With which, like Socrates, he answered fools,
    They would not, in the name of Christ, have mixed
    This hemlock in his chalice.
                         O pitiful
    Pitiful human hearts that must deny
    Their own unfolding heavens, for one light word
    Twisted by whispering malice.
                         Did he mean
    Simplicio, in his dialogues, for the Pope?
    Doubtful enough—the name was borrowed straight
    From older dialogues.
                         If he gave one thought
    Of Urban's to Simplicio—you know well
    How composite are all characters in books,
    How authors find their colours here and there,
    And paint both saints and villains from themselves.
    No matter. This was Urban. Make it clear.
    Simplicio means a simpleton. The saints
    Are aroused by ridicule to most human wrath.
    Urban was once his friend. This hint of ours
    Kills all of that. And so we mortals close
    The doors of Love and Knowledge on the world.
    And so, for many an age, the name of Christ
    Has been misused by man to mask man's hate.
    How should the Church escape, then? I who loved
    My master, know he had no truer friend
    Than many of those true servants of the Church,
    Fathers and priests who, in their lowlier sphere,
    Moved nearer than her cardinals to the Christ.
    These were the very Rome, and held her keys.
    Those who charge Rome with hatred of the light
    Would charge the sun with darkness, and accuse
    This dome of sky for all the blood-red wrongs
    That men commit beneath it. Art and song
    That found her once in Europe their sole shrine
    And sanctuary absolve her from that stain.


    But there's this other charge against my friend,
    And master, Galileo. It is brought
    By friends, made sharper by their pity and grief,
    The charge that he refused his martyrdom
    And so denied his own high faith.
                         Whose faith,—
    His friends', his Protestant followers', or his own?
    Faced by the torture, that sublime old man
    Was still a faithful Catholic, and his thought
    Plunged deeper than his Protestant followers knew.
    His aim was not to strike a blow at Rome
    But to confound his enemies. He believed
    As humbly as Castelli or Celeste
    That there is nothing absolute but that Power
    With which his Church confronted him. To this
    He bowed his head, acknowledging that his light
    Was darkness; but affirming, all the more,
    That Ptolemy's light was even darker yet.
    Read your own Protestant Milton, who derived
    His mighty argument from my master's lips:
    “Whether the sun predominant in heaven
    Rise on the earth, or earth rise on the sun;
    Leave them to God above; Him serve and fear.”

    Just as in boyhood, when my master watched
    The swinging lamp in the cathedral there
    At Pisa; and, by one finger on his pulse,
    Found that, although the great bronze miracle swung
    Through ever-shortening spaces, yet it moved
    More slowly, and so still swung in equal times;
    He straight devised another boon to man,
    Those pulse-clocks which by many a fevered bed
    Our doctors use; dreamed of that timepiece, too,
    Whose punctual swinging pendulum on earth
    Measures the starry periods, and to-day
    Talks peacefully to children by the fire
    Like an old grandad full of ancient tales,
    Remembering endless ages, and foretelling
    Eternities to come; but, all the while
    There, in the dim cathedral, he knew well,
    That dreaming youngster, with his tawny mane
    Of red-gold hair, and deep ethereal eyes,
    What odorous clouds of incense round him rose;
    Was conscious in the dimness, of great throngs
    Kneeling around him; shared in his own heart
    The music and the silence and the cry,
    O, salutaris hostia!—so now,
    There was no mortal conflict in his mind
    Between his dream-clocks and things absolute,
    And one far voice, most absolute of all,
    Feeble with suffering, calling night and day
    Return, return;” the voice of his Celeste.
    All these things co-existed, and the less
    Were comprehended, like the swinging lamp,
    Within that great cathedral of his soul.
    Often he bade me, in that desolate house
    Il Giojello, of old a jewel of light,
    Read to him one sad letter, till he knew
    The most of it by heart, and while he walked
    His garden, leaning on my arm, at times
    I think he quite forgot that I was there;
    For he would quietly murmur it to himself,
    As if she had sent it, half an hour ago:
    “Now, with this little winter's gift of fruit
    I send you, father, from our southward wall,
    Our convent's rarest flower, a Christmas rose.
    At this cold season, it should please you much,
    Seeing how rare it is; but, with the rose,
    You must accept its thorns, which bring to mind
    Our Lord's own bitter Passion. Its green leaves
    Image the hope that through His Passion we,
    After this winter of our mortal life,
    May find the beauty of an eternal spring
    In heaven.”
    Praise me the martyr, out of whose agonies
    Some great new hope is born, but not the fool
    Who starves his heart to prove what eyes can see
    And intellect confirm throughout the world.
    Why must he follow the idiot schoolboy code,
    Torture his soul to reinforce the sight
    Of those that closed their eyes and would not see.
    To your own men of science, fifty turns
    Of the thumbscrew would not prove that earth revolved.
    Call it Italian subtlety if you will,
    I say his intricate cause could not be won
    By blind heroics. Much that his enemies challenged
    Was not yet wholly proven, though his mind
    Had leapt to a certainty. He must leave the rest
    To those that should come after, swift and young,—
    Those runners with the torch for whom he longed
    As his deliverers. Had he chosen death
    Before his hour, his proofs had been obscured
    For many a year. His respite gave him time
    To push new pawns out, in the blindfold play
    Of those last months, and checkmate, not the Church
    But those that hid behind her. He believed
    His truth was all harmonious with her own.
    How could he choose between them? Must he die
    To affirm a discord that himself denied?
    On many a point, he was less sure than we:
    But surer far of much that we forget
    The movements that he saw he could but judge
    By some fixed point in space. He chose the sun.
    Could this be absolute? Could he then be sure
    That this great sun did not with all its worlds
    Move round a deeper centre? What became
    Of your Copernicus then? Could he be sure
    Of any unchanging centre, whence to judge
    This myriad-marching universe, but one—
    The absolute throne of God.
                         Affirming this
    Eternal Rock, his own uncertainties
    Became more certain, and although his lips
    Breathed not a syllable of it, though he stood
    Silent as earth that also seemed so still,
    The very silence thundered, yet it moves!


    He held to what he knew, secured his work
    Through feeble hands like mine, in other lands,
    Not least in England, as I think you know.
    For, partly through your poet, as I believe,
    When his great music rolled upon your skies,
    New thoughts were kindled in the general mind.
    'Twas at Arcetri that your Milton gained
    The first great glimpse of his celestial realm.
    Picture him,—still a prisoner of our light,
    Closing his glorious eyes—that in the dark,
    He might behold this wheeling universe,—
    The planets gilding their ethereal horns
    With sun-fire. Many a pure immortal phrase
    In his own work, as I have pondered it,
    Lived first upon the lips of him whose eyes
    Were darkened first,—in whom, too, Milton found
    That Samson Agonistes, not himself,
    As many have thought, but my dear master dead.
    These are a part of England's memories now,
    The music blown upon her sea-bright air
    When, in the year of Galileo's death,
    Newton, the mightiest of the sons of light,
    Was born to lift the splendour of this torch
    And carry it, as I heard that Tycho said
    Long since to Kepler, “carry it out of sight,
    Into the great new age I must not know,
    Into the great new realm I must not tread.”






    V. NEWTON





    I



    If I saw farther, 'twas because I stood
    On giant shoulders,” wrote the king of thought,
    Too proud of his great line to slight the toils
    Of his forebears. He turned to their dim past,
    Their fading victories and their fond defeats,
    And knelt as at an altar, drawing all
    Their strengths into his own; and so went forth
    With all their glory shining in his face,
    To win new victories for the age to come.
    So, where Copernicus had destroyed the dream
    We called our world; where Galileo watched
    Those ancient firmaments melt, a thin blue smoke
    Into a vaster night; where Kepler heard
    Only stray fragments, isolated chords
    Of that tremendous music which should bind
    All things anew in one, Newton arose
    And carried on their fire.
                         Around him reeled
    Through lingering fumes of hate and clouds of doubt,
    Lit by the afterglow of the Civil War,
    The dissolute throngs of that Walpurgis night
    Where all the cynical spirits that deny
    Danced with the vicious lusts that drown the soul
    In flesh too gross for Circe or her swine.
    But, in his heart, he heard one instant voice.
    “On with the torch once more, make all things new,
    Build the new heaven and earth, and save the world.”



    Ah, but the infinite patience, the long months
    Lavished on tasks that, to the common eye,
    Were insignificant, never to be crowned
    With great results, or even with earth's rewards.
    Could Rembrandt but have painted him, in those hours
    Making his first analysis of light
    Alone, there, in his darkened Cambridge room
    At Trinity! Could he have painted, too,
    The secret glow, the mystery, and the power,
    The sense of all the thoughts and unseen spires
    That soared to heaven around him!
                         He stood there,
    Obscure, unknown, the shadow of a man
    In darkness, like a grey dishevelled ghost,
    —Bare-throated, down at heel, his last night's supper
    Littering his desk, untouched; his glimmering face,
    Under his tangled hair, intent and still,—
    Preparing our new universe.
                         He caught
    The sunbeam striking through that bullet-hole
    In his closed shutter—a round white spot of light
    Upon a small dark screen.
                         He interposed
    A prism of glass. He saw the sunbeam break
    And spread upon the screen its rainbow band
    Of disentangled colours, all in scale
    Like notes in music; first, the violet ray,
    Then indigo, trembling softly into blue;
    Then green and yellow, quivering side by side;
    Then orange, mellowing richly into red.
    Then, in the screen, he made a small, round hole
    Like to the first; and through it passed once more
    Each separate coloured ray. He let it strike
    Another prism of glass, and saw each hue
    Bent at a different angle from its path,
    The red the least, the violet ray the most;
    But all in scale and order, all precise
    As notes in music. Last, he took a lens,
    And, passing through it all those coloured rays,
    Drew them together again, remerging all
    On that dark screen, in one white spot of light.


    So, watching, testing, proving, he resolved
    The seeming random glories of our day
    Into a constant harmony, and found
    How in the whiteness of the sunlight sleep
    Compounded, all the colours of the world.
    He saw how raindrops in the clouds of heaven
    Breaking the light, revealed that sevenfold arch
    Of colours, ranged as on his own dark screen,
    Though now they spanned the mountains and wild seas.
    Then, where that old-world order had gone down
    Beneath a darker deluge, he beheld
    Gleams of the great new order and recalled
    —Fraught with new meaning and a deeper hope—
    That covenant which God made with all mankind
    Throughout all generations: I will set
    My bow in the cloud, that henceforth ye may know
    How deeper than the wreckage of your dreams
    Abides My law, in beauty and in power.






    II



    Yet for that exquisite balance of the mind,
    He, too, must pay the price. He stood alone
    Bewildered, at the sudden assault of fools
    On this, his first discovery.
                         “I have lost
    The most substantial blessing of my quiet
    To follow a vain shadow.
                         I would fain
    Attempt no more. So few can understand,
    Or read one thought. So many are ready at once
    To swoop and sting. Indeed I would withdraw
    For ever from philosophy.” So he wrote
    In grief, the mightiest mind of that new age.
    Let those who'd stone the Roman Curia
    For all the griefs that Galileo knew
    Remember the dark hours that well-nigh quenched
    The splendour of that spirit. He could not sleep.
    Yet, with that patience of the God in man
    That still must seek the Splendour whence it came,
    Through midnight hours of mockery and defeat,
    In loneliness and hopelessness and tears,
    He laboured on. He had no power to see
    How, after many years, when he was dead,
    Out of this new discovery men should make
    An instrument to explore the farthest stars
    And, delicately dividing their white rays,
    Divine what metals in their beauty burned,
    Extort red secrets from the heart of Mars,
    Or measure the molten iron in the sun.
    He bent himself to nearer, lowlier, tasks;
    And seeing, first, that those deflected rays,
    Though it were only by the faintest bloom
    Of colour, imperceptible to our eyes,
    Must dim the vision of Galileo's glass,
    He made his own new weapon of the sky,—
    That first reflecting telescope which should hold
    In its deep mirror, as in a breathless pool
    The undistorted image of a star.






    III



    In that deep night where Galileo groped
    Like a blind giant in dreams to find what power
    Held moons and planets to their constant road
    Through vastness, ordered like a moving fleet;
    What law so married them that they could not clash
    Or sunder, but still kept their rhythmic pace
    As if those ancient tales indeed were true
    And some great angel helmed each gliding sphere;
    Many had sought an answer. Many had caught
    Gleams of the truth; and yet, as when a torch
    Is waved above a multitude at night,
    And shows wild streams of faces, all confused,
    But not the single law that knits them all
    Into an ordered nation, so our skies
    For all those fragmentary glimpses, whirled
    In chaos, till one eagle-spirit soared,
    Found the one law that bound them all in one,
    And through that awful unity upraised
    The soul to That which made and guides them all.


    Did Newton, dreaming in his orchard there
    Beside the dreaming Witham, see the moon
    Burn like a huge gold apple in the boughs
    And wonder why should moons not fall like fruit?
    Or did he see as those old tales declare
    (Those fairy-tales that gather form and fire
    Till, in one jewel, they pack the whole bright world)
    A ripe fruit fall from some immortal tree
    Of knowledge, while he wondered at what height
    Would this earth-magnet lose its darkling power?
    Would not the fruit fall earthward, though it grew
    High o'er the hills as yonder brightening cloud?
    Would not the selfsame power that plucked the fruit
    Draw the white moon, then, sailing in the blue?
    Then, in one flash, as light and song are born,
    And the soul wakes, he saw it—this dark earth
    Holding the moon that else would fly through space
    To her sure orbit, as a stone is held
    In a whirled sling; and, by the selfsame power,
    Her sister planets guiding all their moons;
    While, exquisitely balanced and controlled
    In one vast system, moons and planets wheeled
    Around one sovran majesty, the sun.






    IV



    Light and more light! The spark from heaven was there,
    The flash of that reintegrating fire
    Flung from heaven's altars, where all light is born,
    To feed the imagination of mankind
    With vision, and reveal all worlds in one.
    But let no dreamer dream that his great work
    Sprang, armed, like Pallas from the Thunderer's brain.
    With infinite patience he must test and prove
    His vision now, in those clear courts of Truth
    Whose absolute laws (bemocked by shallower minds
    As less than dreams, less than the faithless faith
    That fears the Truth, lest Truth should slay the dream)
    Are man's one guide to his transcendent heaven;
    For there's no wandering splendour in the soul,
    But in the highest heaven of all is one
    With absolute reality. None can climb
    Back to that Fount of Beauty but through pain.
    Long, long he toiled, comparing first the curves
    Traced by the cannon-ball as it soared and fell
    With that great curving road across the sky
    Traced by the sailing moon.
                         Was earth a loadstone
    Holding them to their paths by that dark force
    Whose mystery men have cloaked beneath a name?
    Yet, when he came to test and prove, he found
    That all the great deflections of the moon,
    Her shining cadences from the path direct,
    Were utterly inharmonious with the law
    Of that dark force, at such a distance acting,
    Measured from earth's own centre....
    For three long years, Newton withheld his hope
    Until that day when light was brought from France,
    New light, new hope, in one small glistening fact,
    Clear-cut as any diamond; and to him
    Loaded with all significance, like the point
    Of light that shows where constellations burn.
    Picard in France—all glory to her name
    Who is herself a light among all lands—
    Had measured earth's diameter once more
    With exquisite precision.
                         To the throng,
    Those few corrected ciphers, his results,
    Were less than nothing; yet they changed the world.
    For Newton seized them and, with trembling hands,
    Began to work his problem out anew.
    Then, then, as on the page those figures turned
    To hieroglyphs of heaven, and he beheld
    The moving moon, with awful cadences
    Falling into the path his law ordained,
    Even to the foot and second, his hand shook
    And dropped the pencil.
                         “Work it out for me,”
    He cried to those around him; for the weight
    Of that celestial music overwhelmed him;
    And, on his page, those burning hieroglyphs
    Were Thrones and Principalities and Powers...
    For far beyond, immeasurably far
    Beyond our sun, he saw that river of suns
    We call the Milky Way, that glittering host
    Powdering the night, each grain of solar blaze
    Divided from its neighbour by a gulf
    Too wide for thought to measure; each a sun
    Huger than ours, with its own fleet of worlds,
    Visible and invisible. Those bright throngs
    That seemed dispersed like a defeated host
    Through blindly wandering skies, now, at the word
    Of one great dreamer, height o'er height revealed
    Hints of a vaster order, and moved on
    In boundless intricacies of harmony
    Around one centre, deeper than all suns,
    The burning throne of God.








    V



    He could not sleep. That intellect, whose wings
    Dared the cold ultimate heights of Space and Time
    Sank, like a wounded eagle, with dazed eyes
    Back, headlong through the clouds to throb on earth.
    What shaft had pierced him? That which also pierced
    His great forebears—the hate of little men.
    They flocked around him, and they flung their dust
    Into the sensitive eyes and laughed to see
    How dust could blind them.
                         If one prickling grain
    Could so put out his vision and so torment
    That delicate brain, what weakness! How the mind
    That seemed to dwarf us, dwindles! Is he mad?
    So buzzed the fools, whose ponderous mental wheels
    Nor dust, nor grit, nor stones, nor rocks could irk
    Even for an instant.
                         Newton could not sleep,
    But all that careful malice could design
    Was blindly fostered by well-meaning folly,
    And great sane folk like Mr. Samuel Pepys
    Canvassed his weakness and slept sound all night.
    For little Samuel with his rosy face
    Came chirping into a coffee-house one day
    Like a plump robin, “Sir, the unhappy state
    Of Mr. Isaac Newton grieves me much.
    Last week I had a letter from him, filled
    With strange complainings, very curious hints,
    Such as, I grieve to say, are common signs
    —I have observed it often—of worse to come.
    He said that he could neither eat nor sleep
    Because of all the embroilments he was in,
    Hinting at nameless enemies. Then he begged
    My pardon, very strangely. I believe
    Physicians would confirm me in my fears.
    'Tis very sad.... Only last night, I found
    Among my papers certain lines composed
    By—whom d'you think?—My lord of Halifax
    (Or so dear Mrs. Porterhouse assured me)
    Expressing, sir, the uttermost satisfaction
    In Mr. Newton's talent. Sir, he wrote
    Answering the charge that science would put out
    The light of beauty, these very handsome lines:


     'When Newton walked by Witham stream
        There fell no chilling shade
      To blight the drifting naiad's dream
        Or make her garland fade.


      The mist of sun was not less bright
        That crowned Urania's hair.
      He robbed it of its colder light,
        But left the rainbow there.'


    They are very neat and handsome, you'll agree.
    Solid in sense as Dryden at his best,
    And smooth as Waller, but with something more,—
    That touch of grace, that airier elegance
    Which only rank can give.
                         'Tis very sad
    That one so nobly praised should—well, no matter!—
    I am told, sir, that these troubles all began
    At Cambridge, when his manuscripts were burned.
    He had been working, in his curious way,
    All through the night; and, in the morning greyness
    Went down to chapel, leaving on his desk
    A lighted candle. You can imagine it,—
    A sadly sloven altar to his Muse,
    Littered with papers, cups, and greasy plates
    Of untouched food. I am told that he would eat
    His Monday's breakfast, sir, on Tuesday morning,
    Such was his absent way!
                         When he returned,
    He found that Diamond (his little dog
    Named Diamond, for a black patch near his tail)
    Had overturned the candle. All his work
    Was burned to ashes.
                         It struck him to the quick,
    Though, when his terrier fawned about his feet,
    He showed no anger. He was heard to say,
    'O Diamond, Diamond, little do you know...'
    But, from that hour, ah well, we'll say no more.”


    Halley was there that day, and spoke up sharply,
    “Sir, there are hints and hints! Do you mean more?”
    —“I do, sir,” chirruped Samuel, mightily pleased
    To find all eyes, for once, on his fat face.
    “I fear his intellects are disordered, sir.”
    —“Good! That's an answer! I can deal with that.
    But tell me first,” quoth Halley, “why he wrote
    That letter, a week ago, to Mr. Pepys.”
    —“Why, sir,” piped Samuel, innocent of the trap,
    “I had an argument in this coffee-house
    Last week, with certain gentlemen, on the laws
    Of chance, and what fair hopes a man might have
    Of throwing six at dice. I happened to say
    That Mr. Isaac Newton was my friend,
    And promised I would sound him.”
                         “Sir,” said Halley,
    “You'll pardon me, but I forgot to tell you
    I heard, a minute since, outside these doors,
    A very modish woman of the town,
    Or else a most delicious lady of fashion,
    A melting creature with a bold black eye,
    A bosom like twin doves; and, sir, a mouth
    Like a Turk's dream of Paradise. She cooed,
    'Is Mr. Pepys within?' I greatly fear
    That they denied you to her!”
                         Off ran Pepys!
    “A hint's a hint,” laughed Halley, “and so to bed.
    But, as for Isaac Newton, let me say,
    Whatever his embroilments were, he solved
    With just one hour of thought, not long ago
    The problem set by Leibnitz as a challenge
    To all of Europe. He published his result
    Anonymously, but Leibnitz, when he saw it,
    Cried out, at once, old enemy as he was,
    'That's Newton, none but Newton! From this claw
    I know the old lion, in his midnight lair.'“






    VI



    (Sir Isaac Newton writes to Mrs. Vincent at Woolthorpe.)



    Your letter, on my eightieth birthday, wakes
    Memories, like violets, in this London gloom.
    You have never failed, for more than three-score years
    To send these annual greetings from the haunts
    Where you and I were boy and girl together.
    A day must come-it cannot now be far—
    When I shall have no power to thank you for them,
    So let me tell you now that, all my life,
    They have come to me with healing in their wings
    Like birds from home, birds from the happy woods
    Above the Witham, where you walked with me
    When you and I were young.
                         Do you remember
    Old Barley—how he tried to teach us drawing?
    He found some promise, I believe, in you,
    But quite despaired of me.
                         I treasure all
    Those little sketches that you sent to me
    Each Christmas, carrying each some glimpse of home.
    There's one I love that shows the narrow lane
    Behind the schoolhouse, where I had that bout
    Of schoolboy fisticuffs. I have never known
    More pleasure, I believe, than when I beat
    That black-haired bully and won, for my reward,
    Those April smiles from you.
                         I see you still
    Standing among the fox-gloves in the hedge;
    And just behind you, in the field, I know
    There was a patch of aromatic flowers,—
    Rest-harrow, was it? Yes; their tangled roots
    Pluck at the harrow; halt the sharp harrow of thought,
    Even in old age. I never breathe their scent
    But I am back in boyhood, dreaming there
    Over some book, among the diligent bees,
    Until you join me, and we dream together.
    They called me lazy, then. Oddly enough
    It was that fight that stirred my mind to beat
    My bully at his books, and head the school;
    Blind rivalry, at first. By such fond tricks
    The invisible Power that shapes us—not ourselves—
    Punishes, teaches, leads us gently on
    Like children, all our lives, until we grasp
    A sudden meaning and are born, through death
    Into full knowledge that our Guide was Love.
    Another picture shows those woods of ours,
    Around whose warm dark edges in the spring
    Primroses, knots of living sunlight, woke;
    And, always, you, their radiant shepherdess
    From Elfland, lead them rambling back for me,
    The dew still clinging to their golden fleece,
    Through these grey memory-mists.
                         Another shows
    My old sun-dial. You say that it is known
    As “Isaac's dial” still. I took great pains
    To set it rightly. If it has not shifted
    'Twill mark the time long after I am gone;
    Not like those curious water-clocks I made.
    Do you remember? They worked well at first;
    But the least particles in the water clogged
    The holes through which it dripped; and so, one day,
    We two came home so late that we were sent
    Supperless to our beds; and suffered much
    From the world's harshness, as we thought it then.
    Would God that we might taste that harshness now.


    I cannot send you what you've sent to me;
    And so I wish you'll never thank me more
    For those poor gifts I have sent from year to year.
    I send another, and hope that you can use it
    To buy yourself those comforts which you need
    This Christmas-time.
                         How strange it is to wake
    And find that half a century has gone by,
    With all our endless youth.
                         They talk to me
    Of my discoveries, prate of undying fame
    Too late to help me. Anything I achieved
    Was done through work and patience; and the men
    Who sought quick roads to glory for themselves
    Were capable of neither. So I won
    Their hatred, and it often hampered me,
    Because it vexed my mind.
                         This world of ours
    Would give me all, now I have ceased to want it;
    For I sit here, alone, a sad old man,
    Sipping his orange-water, nodding to sleep,
    Not caring any more for aught they say,
    Not caring any more for praise or blame;
    But dreaming-things we dreamed of, long ago,
    In childhood.
                  You and I had laughed away
    That boy and girl affair. We were too poor
    For anything but laughter.
                         I am old;
    And you, twice wedded and twice widowed, still
    Retain, through all your nearer joys and griefs,
    The old affection. Vaguely our blind old hands
    Grope for each other in this growing dark
    And deepening loneliness,—to say “good-bye.”
    Would that my words could tell you all my heart;
    But even my words grow old.
                         Perhaps these lines,
    Written not long ago, may tell you more.
    I have no skill in verse, despite the praise
    Your kindness gave me, once; but since I wrote
    Thinking of you, among the woods of home,
    My heart was in them. Let them turn to yours:


      Give me, for friends, my own true folk
      Who kept the very word they spoke;
        Whose quiet prayers, from day to day,
        Have brought the heavens about my way.


      Not those whose intellectual pride
      Would quench the only lights that guide;
        Confuse the lines 'twixt good and ill
        Then throne their own capricious will;


      Not those whose eyes in mockery scan
      The simpler hopes and dreams of man;
        Not those keen wits, so quick to hurt,
        So swift to trip you in the dirt.


      Not those who'd pluck your mystery out,
      Yet never saw your last redoubt;
        Whose cleverness would kill the song
        Dead at your heart, then prove you wrong.


      Give me those eyes I used to know
      Where thoughts like angels come and go;
       —Not glittering eyes, nor dimmed by books,
        But eyes through which the deep soul looks.


      Give me the quiet hands and face
      That never strove for fame and place;
        The soul whose love, so many a day
        Has brought the heavens about my way.






    VII



    Was it a dream, that low dim-lighted room
    With that dark periwigged phantom of Dean Swift
    Writing, beside a fire, to one he loved,—
    Beautiful Catherine Barton, once the light
    Of Newton's house, and his half-sister's child?

    Yes, Catherine Barton, I am brave enough
    To face this pale, unhappy, wistful ghost
    Of our departed friendship.
                         It was I
    Savage and mad, a snarling kennel of sins,
    “Your Holiness,” as you called me, with that smile
    Which even your ghost would quietly turn on me—
    Who raised it up. It has no terrors, dear.
    And I shall never lay it while I live.
    You write to me. You think I have the power
    To shield the fame of Newton from a lie.
    Poor little ghost! You think I hold the keys
    Not only of Parnassus, then, but hell.


    There is a tale abroad that Newton owed
    His public office to Lord Halifax,
    Your secret lover. Coarseness, as you know,
    Is my peculiar privilege. I'll be plain,
    And let them wince who are whispering in the dark.
    They are hinting that he gained his public post
    Through you, his flesh and blood; and that he knew
    You were his patron's mistress!
                         Yes, I know
    The coffee-house that hatched it—to be scotched,
    Nay, killed, before one snuff-box could say “snap,”
    Had not one cold malevolent face been there
    Listening,—that crystal-minded lover of truth,
    That lucid enemy of all lies,—Voltaire.
    I am told he is doing much to spread the light
    Of Newton's great discoveries, there, in France.
    There's little fear that France, whose clear keen eyes
    Have missed no morning in the realm of thought,
    Would fail to see it; and smaller need to lift
    A brand from hell to illume the light from heaven.
    You fear he'll print his lie. No doubt of that.
    I can foresee the phrase, as Halley saw
    The advent of his comet,—jolie niece,
    Assez amiable,
    ... then he'll give your name
    As Madame Conduit, adding just that spice
    Of infidelity that the dates admit
    To none but these truth-lovers. It will be best
    Not to enlighten him, or he'll change his tale
    And make an answer difficult. Let him print
    This truth as he conceives it, and you'll need
    No more defence.
    All history then shall damn his death-cold lie
    And show you for the laughing child you were
    When Newton won his office.
                         For yourself
    You say you have no fear. Your only thought
    Is that they'll soil his fame. Ah yes, they'll try,
    But they'll not hurt it. For all time to come
    It stands there, firm as marble and as pure.
    They can do nothing that the sun and rain
    Will not erase at last. Not even Voltaire
    Can hurt that noble memory. Think of him
    As of a viper writhing at the base
    Of some great statue. Let the venomous tongue
    Flicker against that marble as it may
    It cannot wound it.
                        I am far more grieved
    For you, who sit there wondering now, too late,
    If it were some suspicion, some dark hint
    Newton had heard that robbed him of his sleep,
    And almost broke his mind up. I recall
    How the town buzzed that Newton had gone mad.
    You copy me that sad letter which he wrote
    To Locke, wherein he begs him to forgive
    The hard words he had spoken, thinking Locke
    Had tried to embroil him, as he says, with women;
    A piteous, humble letter.
                         Had he heard
    Some hint of scandal that he could not breathe
    To you, because he honoured you too well?
    I cannot tell. His mind was greatly troubled
    With other things. At least, you need not fear
    That Newton thought it true. He walked aloof,
    Treading a deeper stranger world than ours.
    Have you not told me how he would forget
    Even to eat and drink, when he was wrapt
    In those miraculous new discoveries
    And, under this wild maze of shadow and sun
    Beheld—though not the Master Player's hand—
    The keys from which His organ music rolls,
    Those visible symphonies of wild cloud and light
    Which clothe the invisible world for mortal eyes.
    I have heard that Leibnitz whispered to the court
    That Newton was an “atheist.” Leibnitz knew
    His audience. He could stoop to it.
                         Fools have said
    That knowledge drives out wonder from the world;
    They'll say it still, though all the dust's ablaze
    With miracles at their feet; while Newton's laws
    Foretell that knowledge one day shall be song,
    And those whom Truth has taken to her heart
    Find that it beats in music.
                         Even this age
    Has glimmerings of it. Newton never saw
    His own full victory; but at least he knew
    That all the world was linked in one again;
    And, if men found new worlds in years to come,
    These too must join the universal song.
    That's why true poets love him; and you'll find
    Their love will cancel all that hate can do.
    They are the sentinels of the House of Fame;
    And that quick challenging couplet from the pen
    Of Alexander Pope is answer enough
    To all those whisperers round the outer doors.
    There's Addison, too. The very spirit and thought
    Of Newton moved to music when he wrote
    The Spacious Firmament. Some keen-eyed age to come
    Will say, though Newton seldom wrote a verse,
    That music was his own and speaks his faith.


    And, last, for those who doubt his faith in God
    And man's immortal destiny, there remains
    The granite monument of his own great work,
    That dark cathedral of man's intellect,
    The vast “Principia,” pointing to the skies,
    Wherein our intellectual king proclaimed
    The task of science,—through this wilderness
    Of Time and Space and false appearances,
    To make the path straight from effect to cause,
    Until we come to that First Cause of all,
    The Power, above, beyond the blind machine,
    The Primal Power, the originating Power,
    Which cannot be mechanical. He affirmed it
    With absolute certainty. Whence arises all
    This order, this unbroken chain of law,
    This human will, this death-defying love?
    Whence, but from some divine transcendent Power,
    Not less, but infinitely more than these,
    Because it is their Fountain and their Guide.
    Fools in their hearts have said, “Whence comes this Power,
    Why throw the riddle back this one stage more?”
    And Newton, from a height above all worlds
    Answered and answers still:
                         “This universe
    Exists, and by that one impossible fact
    Declares itself a miracle; postulates
    An infinite Power within itself, a Whole
    Greater than any part, a Unity
    Sustaining all, binding all worlds in one.
    This is the mystery, palpable here and now.
    'Tis not the lack of links within the chain
    From cause to cause, but that the chain exists.
    That's the unfathomable mystery,
    The one unquestioned miracle that we know,
    Implying every attribute of God,
    The ultimate, absolute, omnipresent Power,
    In its own being, deep and high as heaven.
    But men still trace the greater to the less,
    Account for soul with flesh and dreams with dust,
    Forgetting in their manifold world the One,
    In whom for every splendour shining here
    Abides an equal power behind the veil.
    Was the eye contrived by blindly moving atoms,
    Or the still-listening ear fulfilled with music
    By forces without knowledge of sweet sounds?
    Are nerves and brain so sensitively fashioned
    That they convey these pictures of the world
    Into the very substance of our life,
    While That from which we came, the Power that made us,
    Is drowned in blank unconsciousness of all?
    Does it not from the things we know appear
    That there exists a Being, incorporeal,
    Living, intelligent, who in infinite space,
    As in His infinite sensory, perceives
    Things in themselves, by His immediate presence
    Everywhere? Of which things, we see no more
    Than images only, flashed through nerves and brain
    To our small sensories?
                         What is all science then
    But pure religion, seeking everywhere
    The true commandments, and through many forms
    The eternal power that binds all worlds in one?
    It is man's age-long struggle to draw near
    His Maker, learn His thoughts, discern His law,—
    A boundless task, in whose infinitude,
    As in the unfolding light and law of love.
    Abides our hope, and our eternal joy.
    I know not how my work may seem to others—“
    So wrote our mightiest mind—“But to myself
    I seem a child that wandering all day long
    Upon the sea-shore, gathers here a shell,
    And there a pebble, coloured by the wave,
    While the great ocean of truth, from sky to sky
    Stretches before him, boundless, unexplored.”


    He has explored it now, and needs of me
    Neither defence nor tribute. His own work
    Remains his monument He rose at last so near
    The Power divine that none can nearer go;
    None in this age! To carry on his fire
    We must await a mightier age to come.






    VI. WILLIAM HERSCHEL CONDUCTS





    Was it a dream?—that crowded concert-room
    In Bath; that sea of ruffles and laced coats;
    And William Herschel, in his powdered wig,
    Waiting upon the platform, to conduct
    His choir and Linley's orchestra? He stood
    Tapping his music-rest, lost in his own thoughts
    And (did I hear or dream them?) all were mine:



    My periwig's askew, my ruffle stained
    With grease from my new telescope!
                         Ach, to-morrow
    How Caroline will be vexed, although she grows
    Almost as bad as I, who cannot leave
    My work-shop for one evening.
                         I must give
    One last recital at St. Margaret's,
    And then—farewell to music.
                         Who can lead
    Two lives at once?
                       Yet—it has taught me much,
    Thrown curious lights upon our world, to pass
    From one life to another. Much that I took
    For substance turns to shadow. I shall see
    No throngs like this again; wring no more praise
    Out of their hearts; forego that instant joy
    —Let those who have not known it count it vain—
    When human souls at once respond to yours.
    Here, on the brink of fortune and of fame,
    As men account these things, the moment comes
    When I must choose between them and the stars;
    And I have chosen.
                       Handel, good old friend,
    We part to-night. Hereafter, I must watch
    That other wand, to which the worlds keep time.


    What has decided me? That marvelous night
    When—ah, how difficult it will be to guide,
    With all these wonders whirling through my brain!—
    After a Pump-room concert I came home
    Hot-foot, out of the fluttering sea of fans,
    Coquelicot-ribboned belles and periwigged beaux,
    To my Newtonian telescope.
                         The design
    Was his; but more than half the joy my own,
    Because it was the work of my own hand,
    A new one, with an eye six inches wide,
    Better than even the best that Newton made.
    Then, as I turned it on the Gemini,
    And the deep stillness of those constant lights,
    Castor and Pollux, lucid pilot-stars,
    Began to calm the fever of my blood,
    I saw, O, first of all mankind I saw
    The disk of my new planet gliding there
    Beyond our tumults, in that realm of peace.


    What will they christen it? Ach—not Herschel, no!
    Nor Georgium Sidus, as I once proposed;
    Although he scarce could lose it, as he lost
    That world in 'seventy-six.
                         Indeed, so far
    From trying to tax it, he has granted me
    How much?—two hundred golden pounds a year,
    In the great name of science,—half the cost
    Of one state-coach, with all those worlds to win!
    Well—well—we must be grateful. This mad king
    Has done far more than all the worldly-wise,
    Who'll charge even this to madness.
                         I believe
    One day he'll have me pardoned for that...crime,
    When I escaped—deserted, some would say—
    From those drill-sergeants in my native land;
    Deserted drill for music, as I now
    Desert my music for the orchestral spheres.
    No. This new planet is only new to man.
    His majesty has done much. Yet, as my friend
    Declared last night, “Never did monarch buy
    Honour so cheaply”; and—he has not bought it.
    I think that it should bear some ancient name,
    And wear it like a crown; some deep, dark name,
    Like Uranus, known to remoter gods.


    How strange it seems—this buzzing concert-room!
    There's Doctor Burney bowing and, behind him,
    His fox-eyed daughter Fanny.
                         Is it a dream,
    These crowding midgets, dense as clustering bees
    In some great bee-skep?
                         Now, as I lift my wand,
    A silence grips them, and the strings begin,
    Throbbing. The faint lights flicker in gusts of sound.
    Before me, glimmering like a crescent moon,
    The dim half circle of the choir awaits
    Its own appointed time.
                         Beside me now,
    Watching my wand, plump and immaculate
    From buckled shoes to that white bunch of lace
    Under his chin, the midget tenor rises,
    Music in hand, a linnet and a king.
    The bullfinch bass, that other emperor,
    Leans back indifferently, and clears his throat
    As if to say, “This prelude leads to Me!”
    While, on their own proud thrones, on either hand,
    The sumptuously bosomed midget queens,
    Contralto and soprano, jealously eye
    Each other's plumage.
                         Round me the music throbs
    With an immortal passion. I grow aware
    Of an appalling mystery.... We, this throng
    Of midgets, playing, listening, tense and still,
    Are sailing on a midget ball of dust
    We call our planet; will have sailed through space
    Ten thousand leagues before this music ends.
    What does it mean? Oh, God, what can it mean?—
    This weird hushed ant-hill with a thousand eyes;
    These midget periwigs; all those little blurs,
    Tier over tier, of faces, masks of flesh,
    Corruptible, hiding each its hopes and dreams,
    Its tragi-comic dreams.
                         And all this throng
    Will be forgotten, mixed with dust, crushed out,
    Before this book of music is outworn
    Or that tall organ crumbles. Violins
    Outlast their players. Other hands may touch
    That harpsichord; but ere this planet makes
    Another threescore journeys round its sun,
    These breathing listeners will have vanished. Whither?
    I watch my moving hands, and they grow strange!
    What is it moves this body? What am I?
    How came I here, a ghost, to hear that voice
    Of infinite compassion, far away,
    Above the throbbing strings, hark! Comfort ye...


    If music lead us to a cry like this,
    I think I shall not lose it in the skies.
    I do but follow its own secret law
    As long ago I sought to understand
    Its golden mathematics; taught myself
    The way to lay one stone upon another,
    Before I dared to dream that I might build
    My Holy City of Song. I gave myself
    To all its branches. How they stared at me,
    Those men of “sensibility,” when I said
    That algebra, conic sections, fluxions, all
    Pertained to music. Let them stare again.
    Old Kepler knew, by instinct, what I now
    Desire to learn. I have resolved to leave
    No tract of heaven unvisited.
                         To-night
    —The music carries me back to it again!—
    I see beyond this island universe,
    Beyond our sun, and all those other suns
    That throng the Milky Way, far, far beyond,
    A thousand little wisps, faint nebulae,
    Luminous fans and milky streaks of fire;
    Some like soft brushes of electric mist
    Streaming from one bright point; others that spread
    And branch, like growing systems; others discrete,
    Keen, ripe, with stars in clusters; others drawn back
    By central forces into one dense death,
    Thence to be kindled into fire, reborn,
    And scattered abroad once more in a delicate spray
    Faint as the mist by one bright dewdrop breathed
    At dawn, and yet a universe like our own;
    Each wisp a universe, a vast galaxy
    Wide as our night of stars.
                         The Milky Way
    In which our sun is drowned, to these would seem
    Less than to us their faintest drift of haze;
    Yet we, who are borne on one dark grain of dust
    Around one indistinguishable spark
    Of star-mist, lost in one lost feather of light,
    Can by the strength of our own thought, ascend
    Through universe after universe; trace their growth
    Through boundless time, their glory, their decay;
    And, on the invisible road of law, more firm
    Than granite, range through all their length and breadth,
    Their height and depth, past, present and to come.
    So, those who follow the great Work-master's law
    From small things up to great, may one day learn
    The structure of the heavens, discern the whole
    Within the part, as men through Love see God.
    Oh, holy night, deep night of stars, whose peace
    Descends upon the troubled mind like dew,
    Healing it with the sense of that pure reign
    Of constant law, enduring through all change;
    Shall I not, one day, after faithful years,
    Find that thy heavens are built on music, too,
    And hear, once more, above thy throbbing worlds
    This voice of all compassion, Comfort ye,—
    Yes—comfort ye, my people, saith your God?






    VII. SIR JOHN HERSCHEL REMEMBERS





    True type of all, from his own father's hand
    He caught the fire; and, though he carried it far
    Into new regions; and, from southern fields
    Of yellow lupin, added host on host
    To those bright armies which his father knew,
    Surely the crowning hour of all his life
    Was when, his task accomplished, he returned
    A lonely pilgrim to the twilit shrine
    Of first beginnings and his father's youth.
    There, in the Octagon Chapel, with bared head
    Grey, honoured for his father and himself,
    He touched the glimmering keyboard, touched the books
    Those dear lost hands had touched so long ago.


    “Strange that these poor inanimate things outlast
    The life that used them.
                         Yes. I should like to try
    This good old friend of his. You'll leave me here
    An hour or so?”
                    His hands explored the stops;
    And, while the music breathed what else were mute,
    His mind through many thoughts and memories ranged.
    Picture on picture passed before him there
    In living colours, painted on the gloom:
    Not what the world acclaimed, the great work crowned,
    But all that went before, the years of toil;
    The years of infinite patience, hope, despair.
    He saw the little house where all began,
    His father's first resolve to explore the sky,
    His first defeat, when telescopes were found
    Too costly for a music-master's purse;
    And then that dogged and all-conquering will
    Declaring, “Be it so. I'll make my own,
    A better than even the best that Newton made.”
    He saw his first rude telescope—a tube
    Of pasteboard, with a lens at either end;
    And then,—that arduous growth to size and power
    With each new instrument, as his knowledge grew;
    And, to reward each growth, a deeper heaven.
    He saw the good Aunt Caroline's dismay
    When her trim drawing-room, as by wizardry, turned
    Into a workshop, where her brother's hands
    Cut, ground and burnished, hour on aching hour,
    Month after month, new mirrors of the sky.


    Yet, while from dawn to dark her brother moved
    Around some new-cut mirror, burnishing it,
    Knowing that if he once removed his hands
    The surface would be dimmed and must forego
    Its heaven for ever, her quiet hands would raise
    Food to his lips; or, with that musical voice
    Which once—for she, too, offered her sacrifice—
    Had promised her fame, she whiled away the hours
    Reading how, long ago, Aladdin raised
    The djinns, by burnishing that old battered lamp;
    Or, from Cervantes, how one crazy soul
    Tilting at windmills, challenged a purblind world.


    He saw her seized at last by that same fire,
    Burning to help, a sleepless Vestal, dowered
    With lightning-quickness, rushing from desk to clock,
    Or measuring distances at dead of night
    Between the lamp-micrometer and his eyes.


    He saw her in mid-winter, hurrying out,
    A slim shawled figure through the drifted snow,
    To help him; saw her fall with a stifled cry,
    Gashing herself upon that buried hook,
    And struggling up, out of the blood-stained drift,
    To greet him with a smile.
                         “For any soldier,
    This wound,” the surgeon muttered, “would have meant
    Six weeks in hospital.”
                         Not six days for her!
    “I am glad these nights were cloudy, and we lost
    So little,” was all she said.
                         Sir John pulled out
    Another stop. A little ironical march
    Of flutes began to goose-step through the gloom.
    He saw that first “success”! Ay, call it so!
    The royal command,—the court desires to see
    The planet Saturn and his marvellous rings
    On Friday night. The skies, on Friday night,
    Were black with clouds. “Canute me no Canutes,”
    Muttered their new magician, and unpacked
    His telescope. “You shall see what you can see.”
    He levelled it through a window; and they saw
    “Wonderful! Marvellous! Glorious! Eh, what, what!”
    A planet of paper, with a paper ring,
    Lit by a lamp, in a hollow of Windsor Park,
    Among the ferns, where Herne the Hunter walks,
    And Falstaff found that fairies live on cheese.
    Thus all were satisfied; while, above the clouds—
    The thunder of the pedals reaffirmed—
    The Titan planet, every minute, rolled
    Three hundred leagues upon his awful way.
    Then, through that night, the vox humana_spoke
    With deeper longing than Lucretius knew
    When, in his great third book, the somber chant
    Kindled and soared on those exultant wings,
    Praising the master's hand from which he, too,
    —Father, discoverer, hero—caught the fire.
    It spoke of those vast labours, incomplete,
    But, through their incompletion, infinite
    In beauty, and in hope; the task bequeathed
    From dying hand to hand.
                         Close to his grave
    Like a memento mori stood the hulk
    Of that great weapon rusted and outworn,
    Which once broke down the barriers of the sky.
    “Perrupit claustra”; yes, and bridged their gulfs;
    For, far beyond our solar scheme, it showed
    The law that bound our planets binding still
    Those coupled suns which year by year he watched
    Around each other circling.
                         Had our own
    Some distant comrade, lost among the stars?
    Should we not, one day, just as Kepler drew
    His planetary music and its laws
    From all those faithful records Tycho made,
    Discern at last what vaster music rules
    The vaster drift of stars from deep to deep;
    Around what awful Poles, those wisps of light
    Those fifteen hundred universes move?
    One signal, even now, across the dark,
    Declared their worlds confederate with our own;
    For, carrying many secrets, which we now
    Slowly decipher, one swift messenger comes
    Across the abyss...
    The light that, flashing through the immeasurable,
    From universe to universe proclaims
    The single reign of law that binds them all.
    We shall break up those rays and, in their lines
    And colours, read the history of their stars.
    Year after year, the slow sure records grow.
    Awaiting their interpreter. They shall see it,
    Our sons, in that far day, the swift, the strong,
    The triumphing young-eyed runners with the torch.


    No deep-set boundary-mark in Space or Time
    Shall halt or daunt them. Who that once has seen
    How truth leads on to truth, shall ever dare
    To set a bound to knowledge?
                         “Would that he knew"
    —So thought the visitant at that shadowy shrine—
    “Even as the maker of a song can hear
    With the soul's ear, far off, the unstricken chords
    To which, by its own inner law, it climbs,
    Would that my father knew how younger hands
    Completed his own planetary tune;
    How from the planet that his own eyes found
    The mind of man would plunge into the dark,
    And, blindfold, find without the help of eyes
    A mightier planet, in the depths beyond.”


    Then, while the reeds, with quiet melodious pace
    Followed the dream, as in a picture passed,
    Adams, the boy at Cambridge, making his vow
    By that still lamp, alone in that deep night,
    Beneath the crumbling battlements of St. John's,
    To know why Uranus, uttermost planet known,
    Moved in a rhythm delicately astray
    From all the golden harmonies ordained
    By those known measures of its sister-worlds.
    Was there an unknown planet, far beyond,
    Sailing through unimaginable deeps
    And drawing it from its path?
                         Then challenging chords
    Echoed the prophecy that Sir John had made,
    Guided by his own faith in Newton's law:
    We have not found it, but we feel it trembling
    Along the lines of our analysis now
    As once Columbus, from the shores of Spain,
    Felt the new continent.

                         Then, in swift fugues, began
    A race between two nations for the prize
    Of that new world.
                       Le Verrier in France,
    Adams in England, each of them unaware
    Of his own rival, at the selfsame hour
    Resolved to find it.
                         Not by the telescope now!
    Skies might be swept for aeons ere one spark
    Among those myriads were both found and seen
    To move, at that vast distance round our sun.
    They worked by faith in law alone. They knew
    The wanderings of great Uranus, and they knew
    The law of Newton.
                       By the midnight lamp,
    Pencil in hand, shut in a four-walled room,
    Each by pure thought must work his problem out,—
    Given that law, to find the mass and place
    Of that which drew their planet from his course.


    There were no throngs to applaud them. Each alone,
    Without the heat of conflict laboured on,
    Consuming brain and nerve; for throngs applaud
    Only the flash and tinsel of their day,
    Never the quiet runners with the torch.
    Night after night they laboured. Line on line
    Of intricate figures, moving all in law,
    They marshalled. Their long columns formed and marched
    From battle to battle, and no sound was heard
    Of victory or defeat. They marched through snows
    Bleak as the drifts that broke Napoleon's pride
    And through a vaster desert. They drilled their hosts
    With that divine precision of the mind
    To which one second's error in a year
    Were anarchy, that precision which is felt
    Throbbing through music.
                         Month on month they toiled,
    With worlds for ciphers. One rich autumn night
    Brooding over his figures there alone
    In Cambridge, Adams found them moving all
    To one solution. To the unseeing eye
    His long neat pages had no more to tell
    Than any merchant's ledger, yet they shone
    With epic splendour, and like trumpets pealed;
    Three hundred million leagues beyond the path
    Of our remotest planet, drowned in night
    Another and a mightier planet rolls;
    In volume, fifty times more vast than earth,
    And of so huge an orbit that its year
    Wellnigh outlasts our nations. Though it moves
    A thousand leagues an hour, it has not ranged
    Thrice through its seasons since Columbus sailed,
    Or more than once since Galileo died.



    He took his proofs to Greenwich. “Sweep the skies
    Within this limited region now,” he said.
    “You'll find your moving planet. I'm not more
    Than one degree in error.”
                         He left his proofs;
    But Airy, king of Greenwich, looked askance
    At unofficial genius in the young,
    And pigeon-holed that music of the spheres.
    Nine months he waited till Le Verrier, too,
    Pointed to that same region of the sky.
    Then Airy, opening his big sleepy lids,
    Bade Challis use his telescope,—too late,
    To make that honour all his country's own;
    For all Le Verrier's proofs were now with Galle
    Who, being German, had his star-charts ready
    And, in that region, found one needlepoint
    Had moved. A monster planet!
                         Honour to France!
    Honour to England, too, the cry began,
    Who found it also, though she drowsed at Greenwich.
    So—as the French said, with some sting in it—
    “We gave the name of Neptune to our prize
    Because our neighbour England rules the sea.”
    “Honour to all,” say we; for, in these wars,
    Whoever wins a battle wins for all.
    But, most of all, honour to him who found
    The law that was a lantern to their feet,—
    Newton, the first whose thought could soar beyond
    The bounds of human vision and declare,
    “Thus saith the law of Nature and of God
    Concerning things invisible.”
                         This new world
    What was it but one harmony the more
    In that great music which himself had heard,—
    The chant of those reintegrated spheres
    Moving around their sun, while all things moved
    Around one deeper Light, revealed by law,
    Beyond all vision, past all understanding.
    Yet darkly shadowed forth for dreaming men
    On earth in music...
                         Music, all comes back
    To music in the end.
                         Then, in the gloom
    Of the Octagon Chapel, the dreamer lifted up
    His face, as if to all those great forebears.
    The quivering organ rolled upon the dusk
    His dream of that new symphony,—the sun
    Chanting to all his planets on their way
    While, stop to stop replying, height o'er height,
    His planets answered, voices of a dream:


    THE SUN


      Light, on the far faint planets that attend me!
        Light! But for me-the fury and the fire.
      My white-hot maelstroms, the red storms that rend me
        Can yield them still the harvest they desire,


      I kiss with light their sunward-lifted faces.
        With dew-drenched flowers I crown their dusky brows.
      They praise me, lightly, from their pleasant places.
        Their birds belaud me, lightly, from their boughs.


      And men, on lute and lyre, have breathed their pleasure.
        They have watched Apollo's golden chariot roll;
      Hymned his bright wheels, but never mine that measure
        A million leagues of flame from Pole to Pole.


      Like harbour-lights the stars grow wide before me,
        I draw my worlds ten thousand leagues a day.
      Their far blue seas like April eyes adore me.
        They follow, dreaming, on my soundless way.


      How should they know, who wheel around my burning,
        What torments bore them, or what power am I,
      I, that with all those worlds around me turning,
        Sail, every hour, from sky to unplumbed sky?


      My planets, these live embers of my passion,
        These children of my hurricanes of flame,
      Flung thro' the night, for midnight to refashion,
        Praise, and forget, the splendour whence they came.



    THE EARTH


      Was it a dream that, in those bright dominions,
        Are other worlds that sing, with lives like mine,
      Lives that with beating hearts and broken pinions
        Aspire and fall, half-mortal, half-divine?


      A grain of dust among those glittering legions—
        Am I, I only, touched with joy and tears?
      0, silver sisters, from your azure regions,
        Breathe, once again, your music of the spheres:—



    VENUS


      A nearer sun, a rose of light arises,
        To clothe my glens with richer clouds of flowers,
      To paint my clouds with ever new surprises
        And wreathe with mist my rosier domes and towers;


      Where now, to praise their gods, a throng assembles
        Whose hopes and dreams no sphere but mine has known.
      On other worlds the same warm sunlight trembles;
        But life, love, worship, these are mine alone.



    MARS


      And now, as dewdrops in the dawn-light glisten,
        Remote and cold—see—Earth and Venus roll.
      We signalled them—in music! Did they listen?
        Could they not hear those whispers of the soul?


      May not their flesh have sealed that fount of glory,
        That pure ninth sense which told us of mankind?
      Can some deep sleep bereave them of our story
        As darkness hides all colours from the blind?



    JUPITER


      I that am sailing deeper skies and dimmer,
        Twelve million leagues beyond the path of Mars,
      Salute the sun, that cloudy pearl, whose glimmer
        Renews my spring and steers me through the stars.


      Think not that I by distances am darkened.
        My months are years; yet light is in mine eyes.
      Mine eyes are not as yours. Mine ears have hearkened
        To sounds from earth. Five moons enchant my skies.



    SATURN


      And deeper yet, like molten opal shining
        My belt of rainbow glory softly streams.
      And seven white moons around me intertwining
        Hide my vast beauty in a mist of dreams.


      Huge is my orbit; and your flickering planet
        A mote that flecks your sun, that faint white star;
      Yet, in my magic pools, I still can scan it;
        For I have ways to look on worlds afar.



    URANUS


      And deeper yet—twelve million leagues of twilight
        Divide mine empire even from Saturn's ken.
      Is there a world whose light is not as my light,
        A midget world of light-imprisoned men?


      Shut from this inner vision that hath found me,
        They hunt bright shadows, painted to betray;
      And know not that, because their night hath drowned me,
        My giants walk with gods in boundless day.



    NEPTUNE


      Plunge through immensity anew and find me.
        Though scarce I see your sun,—that dying spark—
      Across a myriad leagues it still can bind me
        To my sure path, and steer me through the dark.


      I sail through vastness, and its rhythms hold me,
        Though threescore earths could in my volume sleep!
      Whose are the might and music that enfold me?
        Whose is the law that guides me thro' the Deep?



    THE SUN


      I hear their song. They wheel around my burning!
        I know their orbits; but what path have I?
      I that with all those worlds around me turning
        Sail, every hour, ten thousand leagues of sky?


      My planets, these live embers of my passion,
        And I, too, filled with music and with flame.
      Flung thro' the night, for midnight to refashion,
        Praise and forget the Splendour whence we came.







    EPILOGUE





    Once more upon the mountain's lonely height
    I woke, and round me heard the sea-like sound
    Of pine-woods, as the solemn night-wind washed
    Through the long canyons and precipitous gorges
    Where coyotes moaned and eagles made their nest.
    Once more, far, far below, I saw the lights
    Of distant cities, at the mountain's feet,
    Clustered like constellations.. .
    Over me, like the dome of some strange shrine,
    Housing our great new weapon of the sky,
    And moving on its axis like a moon
    Glimmered the new Uraniborg.
                         Shadows passed
    Like monks, between it and the low grey walls
    That lodged them, like a fortress in the rocks,
    Their monastery of thought.
                         A shadow neared me.
    I heard, once more, an eager living voice:


    “Year after year, the slow sure records grow.
    I wish that old Copernicus could see
    How, through his truth, that once dispelled a dream,
    Broke the false axle-trees of heaven, destroyed
    All central certainty in the universe,
    And seemed to dwarf mankind, the spirit of man
    Laid hold on law, that Jacob's-ladder of light,
    And mounting, slowly, surely, step by step,
    Entered into its kingdom and its power.
    For just as Tycho's tables of the stars
    Within the bound of our own galaxy
    Led Kepler to the music of his laws,
    So, father and son, the Herschels, with their charts
    Of all those fire-mists, those faint nebulae,
    Those hosts of drifting universes, led
    Our new discoverers to yet mightier laws
    Enthroned above all worlds.
                         We have not found them,
    And yet—only the intellectual fool
    Dreams in his heart that even his brain can tick
    In isolated measure, a centre of law,
    Amidst the whirl of universal chaos.
    For law descends from law. Though all the spheres
    Through all the abysmal depths of Space were blown
    Like dust before a colder darker wind
    Than even Lucretius dreamed, yet if one thought,
    One gleam of law within the mind of man,
    Lighten our darkness, there's a law beyond;
    And even that tempest of destruction moves
    To a lighter music, shatters its myriad worlds
    Only to gather them up, as a shattered wave
    Is gathered again into a rhythmic sea,
    Whose ebb and flow are but the pulse of Life,
    In its creative passion.
                         The records grow
    Unceasingly, and each new grain of truth
    Is packed, like radium, with whole worlds of light.
    The eclipses timed in Babylon help us now
    To clock that gradual quickening of the moon,
    Ten seconds in a century.
                         Who that wrote
    On those clay tablets could foresee his gift
    To future ages; dreamed that the groping mind,
    Dowered with so brief a life, could ever range
    With that divine precision through the abyss?
    Who, when that good Dutch spectacle-maker set
    Two lenses in a tube, to read the time
    Upon the distant clock-tower of his church,
    Could dream of this, our hundred-inch, that shows
    The snow upon the polar caps of Mars
    Whitening and darkening as the seasons change?
    Or who could dream when Galileo watched
    His moons of Jupiter, that from their eclipses
    And from that change in their appointed times,
    Now late, now early, as the watching earth
    Farther or nearer on its orbit rolled,
    The immeasurable speed of light at last
    Should be reduced to measure?
                         Could Newton dream
    When, through his prism, he broke the pure white shaft
    Into that rainbow band, how men should gather
    And disentangle ray by delicate ray
    The colours of the stars,—not only those
    That burn in heaven, but those that long since perished,
    Those vanished suns that eyes can still behold,
    The strange lost stars whose light still reaches earth
    Although they died ten thousand years ago.
    Here, night by night, the innumerable heavens
    Speak to an eye more sensitive than man's,
    Write on the camera's delicate retina
    A thousand messages, lines of dark and bright
    That speak of elements unknown on earth.
    How shall men doubt, who thus can read the Book
    Of Judgment, and transcend both Space and Time,
    Analyse worlds that long since passed away,
    And scan the future, how shall they doubt His power
    From whom their power and all creation came?”


    I think that, when the second Herschel tried
    Those great hexameters in our English tongue,
    A nobler shield than ever Achilles knew
    Shone through the song and made his
    echoes live:


    “There he depicted the earth, and the canopied sky, and the
          sea-waves,
    There the unwearied sun, and the full-orbed moon in their courses,
    All the configured stars that gem the circuit of heaven,
    Pleiads and Hyads were there and the giant force of Orion,
    There the revolving Bear, which the Wain they call, was ensculptured,
    Circling on high, and in all his courses regarding Orion,
    Sole of the starry train that descends not to bathe in the ocean!”



    A nobler shield for us, a deeper sky;
    But even to us who know how far away
    Those constellations burn, the wonder bides
    That each vast sun can speed through the abyss
    Age after age more swiftly than an eagle,
    Each on its different road, alone like ours
    With its own satellites; yet, since Homer sang,
    Their aspect has not altered! All their flight
    Has not yet changed the old pattern of the Wain.
    The sword-belt of Orion is not sundered.
    Nor has one fugitive splendour broken yet
    From Cassiopeia's throne.
                         A thousand years
    Are but as yesterday, even unto these.
    How shall men doubt His empery over time
    Whose dwelling is a deep so absolute
    That we can only find Him in our souls.
    For there, despite Copernicus, each may find
    The centre of all things. There He lives and reigns.
    There infinite distance into nearness grows,
    And infinite majesty stoops to dust again;
    All things in little, infinite love in man . . .
    Oh, beating wings, descend to earth once more,
    And hear, reborn, the desert singer's cry:
    When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers,
    The sun and the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained,
    Though man be as dust I know Thou art mindful of him;
    And, through Thy law, Thy light still visiteth him.







    THE END