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 humanaspoke

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: