Chapter 10 No.10

He was a great magician, Tycho Brahe,

And yet his magic, under changing skies,

Could never change his heart, or touch the hills

Of those far countries with the tints of home.

And, after many a month of wandering,

He came to Prague; and, though with open hands

Rodolphe received him, like an exiled king,

A new Aeneas, exiled for the truth

(For so they called him), none could heal the wounds

That bled within, or lull his grief to sleep

With that familiar whisper of the waves,

Ebbing and flowing around Uraniborg.

Doggedly still he laboured; point by point,

Crept on, with aching heart and burning brain,

Until his table of the stars had reached

The thousand that he hoped, to crown his toil.

But Christine heard him murmuring in the night,

"The work, the work! Not to have lived in vain!

Into whose hands can I entrust it all?

I thought to find him standing by the way,

Waiting to seize the splendour from my hand,

The swift, young-eyed runner with the torch.

Let me not live in vain, let me not fall

Before I yield it to the appointed soul."

And yet the Power that made and broke him heard:

For, on a certain day, to Tycho came

Another exile, guided through the dark

Of Europe by the starlight in his eyes,

Or that invisible hand which guides the world.

He asked him, as the runner with the torch

Alone could ask, asked as a natural right

For Tycho's hard-won life-work, those results,

His tables of the stars. He gave his name

Almost as one who told him, It is I;

And yet unconscious that he told; a name

Not famous yet, though truth had marked him out

Already, by his exile, as her own,-

The name of Johann Kepler.

"It was strange,"

Wrote Kepler, not long after, "for I asked

Unheard-of things, and yet he gave them to me

As if I were his son. When first I saw him,

We seemed to have known each other years ago

In some forgotten world. I could not guess

That Tycho Brahe was dying. He was quick

Of temper, and we quarrelled now and then,

Only to find ourselves more closely bound

Than ever. I believe that Tycho died

Simply of heartache for his native land.

For though he always met me with a smile,

Or jest upon his lips, he could not sleep

Or work, and often unawares I caught

Odd little whispered phrases on his lips

As if he talked to himself, in a kind of dream.

Yet I believe the clouds dispersed a little

Around his death-bed, and with that strange joy

Which comes in death, he saw the unchanging stars.

Christine was there. She held him in her arms.

I think, too, that he knew his work was safe.

An hour before he died, he smiled at me,

And whispered,-what he meant I hardly know-

Perhaps a broken echo from the past,

A fragment of some old familiar thought,

And yet I seemed to know. It haunts me still:

'Come then, swift-footed, let me see you stand,

Waiting before me, crowned with youth and joy;

This is the turning. Take it from my hand.

For I am ready, ready now, to fall.'"