"To-morrow night"--so wrote their chief--"we try Our great new telescope, the hundred-inch. Your Milton's 'optic tube' has grown in power Since Galileo, famous, blind, and old, Talked with him, in that prison, of the sky. We creep to power by inches. Europe trusts Her 'giant forty' still. Even to-night Our own old sixty has its work to do; And now our hundred-inch . . . I hardly dare To think what this new muzzle of ours may find. Come up, and spend that night among the stars Here, on our mountain-top. If all goes well, Then, at the least, my friend, you'll see a moon Stranger, but nearer, many a thousand mile Than earth has ever seen her, even in dreams. As for the stars, if seeing them were all, Three thousand million new-found points of light Is our rough guess. But never speak of this. You know our press. They'd miss the one result To flash 'three thousand millions' round the world." To-morrow night! For more than twenty years, They had thought and planned and worked. Ten years had gone, One-fourth, or more, of man's brief working life, Before they made those solid tons of glass, Their hundred-inch reflector, the clear pool, The polished flawless pool that it must be To hold the perfect image of a star. And, even now, some secret flaw--none knew Until to-morrow's test--might waste it all. Where was the gambler that would stake so much,-- Time, patience, treasure, on a single throw? The cost of it,--they'd not find that again, Either in gold or life-stuff! All their youth Was fuel to the flame of this one work. Once in a lifetime to the man of science, Despite what fools believe his ice-cooled blood, There comes this drama. If he fails, he fails Utterly. He at least will have no time For fresh beginnings. Other men, no doubt, Years hence, will use the footholes that he cut In those precipitous cliffs, and reach the height, But he will never see it." So for me, The light words of that letter seemed to hide The passion of a lifetime, and I shared The crowning moment of its hope and fear. Next day, through whispering aisles of palm we rode Up to the foot-hills, dreaming desert-hills That to assuage their own delicious drought Had set each tawny sun-kissed slope ablaze With peach and orange orchards. Up and up, Along the thin white trail that wound and climbed And zig-zagged through the grey-green mountain sage, The car went crawling, till the shining plain Below it, like an airman's map, unrolled. Houses and orchards dwindled to white specks In midget cubes and squares of tufted green. Once, as we rounded one steep curve, that made The head swim at the canyoned gulf below, We saw through thirty miles of lucid air Elvishly small, sharp as a crumpled petal Blown from the stem, a yard away, a sail Lazily drifting on the warm blue sea. Up for nine miles along that spiral trail Slowly we wound to reach the lucid height