Watchers of the Sky | Page 2

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.
CONTENTS
Prologue
I. Copernicus
II. Tycho Brahe
III. Kepler
IV. Galileo
V. Newton
VI. William Herschel Conducts
VII. Sir John Herschel Remembers
Epilogue
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