In law, whose service only sets them free." Therefore it often leaps to the truth we seek, Clasping it, as a lover clasps his bride In darkness, ere the sage can light his lamp. And so, in music, men might find the road To truth, at many a point, where sages grope. One day, a greater Plato would arise To write a new philosophy, he said, Showing how music is the golden clue To all the windings of the world's dark maze. Himself had used it, partly proved it, too, In his own book,--_the Harmonies of the World._ 'All that the years discover points one way To this great ordered harmony," he said, "Revealed on earth by music. Planets move In subtle accord like notes of one great song Audible only to the Artificer, The Eternal Artist. There's no grief, no pain, But music--follow it simply as a clue, A microcosmic pattern of the whole-- Can show you, somewhere in its golden scheme, The use of all such discords; and, at last, Their exquisite solution. Then darkness breaks Into diviner light, love's agony climbs Through death to life, and evil builds up heaven. Have you not heard, in some great symphony, Those golden mathematics making clear The victory of the soul? Have you not heard The very heavens opening? Do those fools Who thought me an infidel then, still smile at me For trying to read the stars in terms of song, Discern their orbits, measure their distances, By musical proportions? Let them smile, My folly at least revealed those three great laws; Gave me the golden vases of the Egyptians, To set in the great new temple of my God Beyond the bounds of Egypt. They will forget My methods, doubtless, as the years go by, And the world's wisdom shuts its music out. The dust will gather on all my harmonies; Or scholars turn my pages listlessly, Glance at the musical phrases, and pass on, Not troubling even to read one Latin page. Yet they'll accept those great results as mine. I call them mine. How can I help exulting, Who climbed my ladder of music to the skies And found, by accident, let them call it so, Or by the inspiration of that Power Which built His world of music, those three laws:-- First, how the speed of planets round the sun Bears a proportion, beautifully precise As music, to their silver distances; Next, that although they seem to swerve aside From those plain circles of old Copernicus Their paths were not less rhythmical and exact, But followed always that most exquisite curve In its most perfect form, the pure ellipse; Third, that although their speed from point to point Appeared to change, their radii always moved Through equal fields of space in equal times. Was this my infidelity, was this Less full of beauty, less divine in truth, Than their dull chaos? You, the poet will know How, as those dark perplexities grew clear, And old anomalous discords changed to song, My whole soul bowed and cried, _Almighty God These are Thy thoughts, I am thinking after Thee!_