Once more upon the mountain's lonely height I woke, and round me heard the sea-like sound Of pine-woods, as the solemn night-wind washed Through the long canyons and precipitous gorges Where coyotes moaned and eagles made their nest. Once more, far, far below, I saw the lights Of distant cities, at the mountain's feet, Clustered like constellations.. . Over me, like the dome of some strange shrine, Housing our great new weapon of the sky, And moving on its axis like a moon Glimmered the new Uraniborg. Shadows passed Like monks, between it and the low grey walls That lodged them, like a fortress in the rocks, Their monastery of thought. A shadow neared me. I heard, once more, an eager living voice: "Year after year, the slow sure records grow. I wish that old Copernicus could see How, through his truth, that once dispelled a dream, Broke the false axle-trees of heaven, destroyed All central certainty in the universe, And seemed to dwarf mankind, the spirit of man Laid hold on law, that Jacob's-ladder of light, And mounting, slowly, surely, step by step, Entered into its kingdom and its power. For just as Tycho's tables of the stars Within the bound of our own galaxy Led Kepler to the music of his laws, So, father and son, the Herschels, with their charts Of all those fire-mists, those faint nebulae, Those hosts of drifting universes, led Our new discoverers to yet mightier laws Enthroned above all worlds. We have not found them, And yet--only the intellectual fool Dreams in his heart that even his brain can tick In isolated measure, a centre of law, Amidst the whirl of universal chaos. For law descends from law. Though all the spheres Through all the abysmal depths of Space were blown Like dust before a colder darker wind Than even Lucretius dreamed, yet if one thought, One gleam of law within the mind of man, Lighten our darkness, there's a law beyond; And even that tempest of destruction moves To a lighter music, shatters its myriad worlds Only to gather them up, as a shattered wave Is gathered again into a rhythmic sea, Whose ebb and flow are but the pulse of Life, In its creative passion. The records grow Unceasingly, and each new grain of truth Is packed, like radium, with whole worlds of light. The eclipses timed in Babylon help us now To clock that gradual quickening of the moon, Ten seconds in a century. Who that wrote On those clay tablets could foresee his gift To future ages; dreamed that the groping mind, Dowered with so brief a life, could ever range With that divine precision through the abyss? Who, when that good Dutch spectacle-maker set Two lenses in a tube, to read the time Upon the distant clock-tower of his church, Could dream of this, our hundred-inch, that shows The snow upon the polar caps of Mars Whitening and darkening as the seasons change? Or who could dream when Galileo watched