Chapter 9 No.9

He was a great magician, Tycho Brahe,

But not so great that he could read the heart

Or rule the hand of princes.

When his friend

King Frederick died, the young Prince Christian reigned;

And, round him, fool and knave made common cause

Against the magic that could pour their gold

Into a gulf of stars. This Tycho Brahe

Had grown too proud. He held them in contempt,

So they believed; for, when he spoke, their thoughts

Crept at his feet like spaniels. Junkerdom

Felt it was foolish, for he towered above it,

And so it hated him. Did he not spend

Gold that a fool could spend as quickly as he?

Were there not great estates bestowed upon him

In wisdom's name, that from the dawn of time

Had been the natural right of Junkerdom?

And would he not bequeath them to his heirs,

The children of Christine, an unfree woman?

"Why you, sire, even you," they told the king,

"He has made a laughing-stock. That horoscope

He read for you, the night when you were born,

Printed, and bound it in green velvet, too,-

Read it The whole world laughs at it. He said

That Venus was the star that ruled your fate,

And Venus would destroy you. Tycho Brahe

Inspired your royal father with the fear

That kept your youth so long in leading-strings,

The fear that every pretty hedgerow flower

Would be your Circe. So he thought to avenge

Our mockery of this peasant-girl Christine,

To whom, indeed, he plays the faithful swine,

Knowing full well his gold and silver nose

Would never win another."

Thus the sky

Darkened above Uraniborg, and those

Who dwelt within it, till one evil day,

One seeming happy day, when Tycho marked

The seven-hundredth star upon his chart,

Two pompous officers from Walchendorp,

The chancellor, knocked at Tycho's eastern gate.

"We are sent," they said, "to see and to report

What use you make of these estates of yours.

Your alchemy has turned more gold to lead

Than Denmark can approve. The uses now!

Show us the uses of this work of yours."

Then Tycho showed his tables of the stars,

Seven hundred stars, each noted in its place

With exquisite precision, the result

Of watching heaven for five-and-twenty years.

"And is this all?" they said.

They sought to invent

Some ground for damning him. The truth alone

Would serve them, as it seemed. For these were men

Who could not understand.

"Not all, I hope,"

Said Tycho, "for I think, before I die,

I shall have marked a thousand."

"To what end?

When shall we reap the fruits of all this toil?

Show us its uses."

"In the time to come,"

Said Tycho Brahe, "perhaps a hundred years,

Perhaps a thousand, when our own poor names

Are quite forgotten, and our kingdoms dust,

On one sure certain day, the torch-bearers

Will, at some point of contact, see a light

Moving upon this chaos. Though our eyes

Be shut for ever in an iron sleep,

Their eyes shall see the kingdom of the law,

Our undiscovered cosmos. They shall see it-

A new creation rising from the deep,

Beautiful, whole.

We are like men that hear

Disjointed notes of some supernal choir.

Year after year, we patiently record

All we can gather. In that far-off time,

A people that we have not known shall hear them,

Moving like music to a single end."

They could not understand: this life that sought

Only to bear the torch and hand it on;

And so they made report that all the dreams

Of Tycho Brahe were fruitless; perilous, too,

Since he avowed that any fruit they bore

Would fall, in distant years, to alien hands.

Little by little, Walchendorp withdrew

His rents from Tycho Brahe, accusing him

Of gross neglects. The Chapel at Roskilde

Was falling into ruin. Tycho Brahe

Was Keeper of the Bones of Oldenburg.

He must rebuild the Chapel. All the gifts

That Frederick gave to help him in his task,

Were turned to stumbling-blocks; till, one dark day,

He called his young disciples round him there,

And in that mellow library of dreams,

Lit by the dying sunset, poured his heart

And mind before them, bidding them farewell.

Through the wide-open windows as he spoke

They heard the sorrowful whisper of the sea

Ebbing and flowing around Uraniborg.

"An end has come," he said, "to all we planned.

Uraniborg has drained her treasury dry.

Your Alma Mater now must close her gates

On you, her guests; on me; and, worst of all,

On one most dear, who made this place my home.

For you are young, your homes are all to win,

And you would all have gone your separate ways

In a brief while; and, though I think you love

Your college of the skies, it could not mean

All that it meant to those who called it 'home.'

You that have worked with me, for one brief year,

Will never quite forget Uraniborg.

This room, the sunset gilding all those books,

The star-charts and that old celestial globe,

The long bright evenings by the winter fire,

Of Tycho Brahe were fruitless; perilous

The talk that opened heaven, the songs you sung,

Yes, even, I think, the tricks you played with Jeppe,

Will somehow, when yourselves are growing old,

Be hallowed into beauty, touched with tears,

For you will wish they might be yours again.

These have been mine for five-and-twenty years,

And more than these,-the work, the dreams I shared

With you, and others here. My heart will break

To leave them. But the appointed time has come

As it must come to all men.

You and I

Have watched too many constant stars to dream

That heaven or earth, the destinies of men

Or nations, are the sport of chance. An end

Comes to us all through blindness, age, or death.

If mine must come in exile, it stall find me

Bearing the torch as far as I can bear it,

Until I fall at the feet of the young runner,

Who takes it from me, and carries it out of sight,

Into the great new age I shall not know,

Into the great new realms I must not tread.

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

Waiting before me, crowned with youth and joy,

At the next turning. Take it from my hand,

For I am almost ready now to fall.

Something I have achieved, yes, though I say it,

I have not loitered on that fiery way.

And if I front the judgment of the wise

In centuries to come, with more of dread

Than my destroyers, it is because this work

Will be of use, remembered and appraised,

When all their hate is dead.

I say the work,

Not the blind rumour, the glory or fame of it.

These observations of seven hundred stars

Are little enough in sight of those great hosts

Which nightly wheel around us, though I hope,

Yes, I still hope, in some more generous land

To make my thousand up before I die.

Little enough, I know,-a midget's work!

The men that follow me, with more delicate art

May add their tens of thousands; yet my sum

Will save them just that five-and-twenty years

Of patience, bring them sooner to their goal,

That kingdom of the law I shall not see.

We are on the verge of great discoveries.

I feel them as a dreamer feels the dawn

Before his eyes are opened. Many of you

Will see them. In that day you will recall

This, our last meeting at Uraniborg,

And how I told you that this work of ours

Would lead to victories for the coming age.

The victors may forget us. What of that?

Theirs be the palms, the shouting, and the praise.

Ours be the fathers' glory in the sons.

Ours the delight of giving, the deep joy

Of labouring, on the cliff's face, all night long,

Cutting them foot-holes in the solid rock,

Whereby they climb so gaily to the heights,

And gaze upon their new-discovered worlds.

You will not find me there. When you descend,

Look for me in the darkness at the foot

Of those high cliffs, under the drifted leaves.

That's where we hide at last, we pioneers,

For we are very proud, and must be sought

Before the world can find us, in our graves.

There have been compensations. I have seen

In darkness, more perhaps than eyes can see

When sunlight blinds them on the mountain-tops;

Guessed at a glory past our mortal range,

And only mine because the night was mine.

Of those three systems of the universe,

The Ptolemaic, held by all the schools,

May yet be proven false. We yet may find

This earth of ours is not the sovran lord

Of all those wheeling spheres. Ourselves have marked

Movements among the planets that forbid

Acceptance of it wholly. Some of these

Are moving round the sun, if we can trust

Our years of watching. There are stranger dreams.

This radical, Copernicus, the priest,

Of whom I often talked with you, declares

Ail of these movements can be reconciled,

If-a hypothesis only-we should take

The sun itself for centre, and assume

That this huge earth, so 'stablished, so secure

In its foundations, is a planet also,

And moves around the sun.

I cannot think it.

This leap of thought is yet too great for me.

I have no doubt that Ptolemy was wrong.

Some of his planets move around the sun.

Copernicus is nearer to the truth

In some things. But the planets we have watched

Still wander from the course that he assigned.

Therefore, my system, which includes the best

Of both, I hold may yet be proven true.

This earth of ours, as Jeppe declared one day,

So simply that we laughed, is 'much too big

To move,' so let it be the centre still,

And let the planets move around their sun;

But let the sun with all its planets move

Around our central earth.

This at the least

Accords with all we know, and saves mankind

From that enormous plunge into the night;

Saves them from voyaging for ten thousand years

Through boundless darkness without sight of land;

Saves them from all that agony of loss,

As one by one the beacon-fires of faith

Are drowned in blackness.

I beseech you, then,

Let me be proven wrong, before you take

That darkness lightly. If at last you find

The proven facts against me, take the plunge.

Launch out into that darkness. Let the lamps

Of heaven, the glowing hearth-fires that we knew

Die out behind you, while the freshening wind

Blows on your brows, and overhead you see

The stars of truth that lead you from your home.

I love this island,-every little glen,

Hazel-wood, brook, and fish-pond; every bough

And blossom in that garden; and I hoped

To die here. But it is not chance, I know,

That sends me wandering through the world again.

My use perhaps is ended; and the power

That made me, breaks me."

As he spoke, they saw

The tears upon his face. He bowed his head

And left them silent in the darkened room.

They saw his face no more.

The self-same hour,

Tycho, Christine, and all their children, left

Their island-home for even In their ship

They took a few of the smaller instruments,

And that most precious record of the stars,

His legacy to the future. Into the night

They vanished, leaving on the ghostly cliffs

Only one dark, distorted, dog-like shape

To watch them, sobbing, under its matted hair,

"Master, have you forgotten Jeppe, your dwarf?"