Chapter IV

Light and more light! The spark from heaven was there, The flash of that reintegrating fire Flung from heaven's altars, where all light is born, To feed the imagination of mankind With vision, and reveal all worlds in one. But let no dreamer dream that his great work Sprang, armed, like Pallas from the Thunderer's brain. With infinite patience he must test and prove His vision now, in those clear courts of Truth Whose absolute laws (bemocked by shallower minds As less than dreams, less than the faithless faith That fears the Truth, lest Truth should slay the dream) Are man's one guide to his transcendent heaven; For there's no wandering splendour in the soul, But in the highest heaven of all is one With absolute reality. None can climb Back to that Fount of Beauty but through pain. Long, long he toiled, comparing first the curves Traced by the cannon-ball as it soared and fell With that great curving road across the sky Traced by the sailing moon. Was earth a loadstone Holding them to their paths by that dark force Whose mystery men have cloaked beneath a name? Yet, when he came to test and prove, he found That all the great deflections of the moon, Her shining cadences from the path direct, Were utterly inharmonious with the law Of that dark force, at such a distance acting, Measured from earth's own centre.... For three long years, Newton withheld his hope Until that day when light was brought from France, New light, new hope, in one small glistening fact, Clear-cut as any diamond; and to him Loaded with all significance, like the point Of light that shows where constellations burn. Picard in France--all glory to her name Who is herself a light among all lands-- Had measured earth's diameter once more With exquisite precision. To the throng, Those few corrected ciphers, his results, Were less than nothing; yet they changed the world. For Newton seized them and, with trembling hands, Began to work his problem out anew. Then, then, as on the page those figures turned To hieroglyphs of heaven, and he beheld The moving moon, with awful cadences Falling into the path his law ordained, Even to the foot and second, his hand shook And dropped the pencil. "Work it out for me," He cried to those around him; for the weight Of that celestial music overwhelmed him; And, on his page, those burning hieroglyphs Were Thrones and Principalities and Powers... For far beyond, immeasurably far Beyond our sun, he saw that river of suns We call the Milky Way, that glittering host Powdering the night, each grain of solar blaze Divided from its neighbour by a gulf Too wide for thought to measure; each a sun Huger than ours, with its own fleet of worlds, Visible and invisible. Those bright throngs That seemed dispersed like a defeated host Through blindly wandering skies, now, at the word Of one great dreamer, height o'er height revealed Hints of a vaster order, and moved on In boundless intricacies of harmony Around one centre, deeper than all suns, The burning throne of God.