drawing the waters of the earth in a flow and ebb, the gauge of which and the time-table could be advertised beforehand in the almanack; of the stars, that they swung as by clockwork around the pole. Says the son of Sirach concerning them—

CONTENTS

So evident is this celestial harmony that men, seeking to account for it by what was most harmonious in themselves or in their experience, supposed an actual Music of the Spheres inaudible to mortals; Plato (who learned of Pythagoras) inventing his Octave of Sirens, spinning in the whorls of the great planets and intoning as they spin; Chaucer (who learned of Dante and makes the spheres nine) in his Parliament of Foules telling, out of Cicero's Somnium Scipionis, how the great Scipio Africanus visited his descendant in a dream and—

CONTENTS

While Shakespeare in the last Act of The Merchant of Venice makes all the stars vocal, and not the planets only:

CONTENTS

And Milton in Arcades goes straight back to Plato (save that his spheres are nine, as with Chaucer):

CONTENTS

then listen I

From the greater poets let us turn to a lesser one, whom we shall have occasion to quote again by and by: to the Orchestra of Sir John Davies (1596), who sees this whole Universe treading the harmonious measures of a dance; and let us select one stanza, of the tides:

CONTENTS

This may be fantastic. As the late Professor Skeat informed the world solemnly in a footnote, "Modern astronomy has exploded the singular notion of revolving hollow concentric spheres...." (The Professor wrote "singular" when he meant "curious."—The notion was never "singular.") "These 'spheres,' " he adds, "have disappeared, and their music with them, except in poetry." Nevertheless the fable presents a truth, and one of the two most important truths in the world. This Universe is not a Chaos. (If it were, by the way, we should be unable to reason about it at all.) It stands and is continually renewed upon an ascertained harmony: and what Plato called "Necessity" is the duty in all things of obedience to that harmony, the Duty of which Wordsworth sings in his noble Ode,

CONTENTS

 

 Prev. P 2/25 next