Chapter XIV: Uranus

Get our bearings, Time!
Ballast well, and trim thy wondrous aerial car
For another dread abyss, lying there afar
Outward, bordering Uranus’s remote, lonely shore--
A shore of frightful silence, brooding ever o’er
Appalling solitudes, o’er which e’en God may weep!
And as we launch away vague horrors o’er us creep;
But like many a threat’ning danger bravely faced,
The soul is calmed if it by right be braced.
And thus we reason as we dare the dismal deeps,
And a sense of kindest protection o’er us creeps.
And thus we win our way unerringly again,
And these tragic recesses yawn at us in vain;
And out from the dim, weird spaces, with stately tread,
Moving in majestic order, with uplifted head,
Appears stately Uranus!
We salute thee on our far journey outward bound,
And invade thy orbit--an elliptic way profound;
But though thy great moons in all thy pride are beaming,
And the tremulous stars in vague distance dreaming,
We can but view thee vaguely--thy shades sternly hide
Thy cold, averted face, and mien of lofty pride.
Perhaps a race more haughty, more selfish than our own,
In arrogated power is fixed on this far zone.
Strange that the system’s otherwise immutable laws
Revolve thy moons from east to west--wherefore the cause?
Has some fierce convulsion disturbed thy outward form,
O’erturning thy satellites in a planetary storm?

Because thou art so remote we do not know thee well,
And untold millions may on thy surface dwell.
We leave thee in thy vast area of solitude,
Never again on thy presence to intrude.
And the deep, shoreless, interminable ocean
Of gloom closes round thy evanishing motion!
And I shrink on the verge of an appalling sea
Of chaotic abysses and wastes before me!

But it passes away
As for strength and deliverance we fervently pray;
And faith and full trust have returned unto me
On the verge of that dreary and desolate sea.
Look not beneath us; look up! aye, up and away!
And let not these weird terrors affright or dismay.
Like a meteor we glide in the sure car of Time,
Peering after the secrets that still are divine.