“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.)
