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."
