You were a great magician, Tycho Brahe; And, now that they have driven you away, I, that am only Jeppe,--the crooked dwarf, You used to laugh at for his matted hair, And head too big and heavy--take your pen Here in your study. I will write it down And send it by a sailor to the King Of Scotland, and who knows, the mouse that gnawed The lion free, may save you, Tycho Brahe.'" "He is free now," said Kepler, "had he lived He would have sent for Jeppe to join him there At Prague. But death forestalled him, and your King. The years in which he watched that planet Mars, His patient notes and records, all were mine; And, mark you, had he clipped or trimmed one fact By even a hair's-breadth, so that his results Made a pure circle of that planet's path It might have baffled us for an age and drowned All our new light in darkness. But he held To what he saw. He might so easily, So comfortably have said, 'My instruments Are crude and fallible. In so fine a point Eyes may have erred, too. Why not acquiesce? Why mar the tune, why dislocate a world, For one slight clash of seeming fact with faith?' But no, though stars might swerve, he held his course, Recording only what his eyes could see Until death closed them. Then, to his results, I added mine and saw, in one wild gleam, Strange as the light of day to one born blind, A subtler concord ruling them and heard Profounder tones of harmony resolve Those broken melodies into song again."-- "Faintly and far away, I, too, have seen In music, and in verse, that golden clue Whereof you speak," said Wotton. "In all true song, There is a hidden logic. Even the rhyme That, in bad poets, wrings the neck of thought, Is like a subtle calculus to the true, An instrument of discovery. It reveals New harmonies, new analogies. It links Far things and near, not in unnatural chains, But in those true accords which still escape The plodding reason, yet unify the world. I caught some glimpses of this mystic power In verses of your own, that elegy On Tycho, and that great quatrain of yours-- I cannot quite recall the Latin words, But made it roughly mine in words like these: _'I know that I am dust, and daily die; Yet, as I trace those rhythmic spheres at night, I stand before the Thunderer's throne on high And feast on nectar in the halls of light.'_