Poetry

(_underscores_ denote italics)

"Trust in good verses then:
They only shall aspire,
When pyramids, as men
Are lost i'the funeral fire."

As the tale is told by Plato, in the tenth book of his Republic, one
Er the son of Arminius, a Pamphylian, was slain in battle; and ten days
afterwards, when they collected the bodies for burial, his body alone
showed no taint of corruption. His relatives, however, bore it off to
the funeral pile; and on the twelfth day, lying there, he returned to
life and told them what he had seen in the other world. Many wonders he
related concerning the dead, for example, with their rewards and
punishments: but most wonderful of all was the great Spindle of
Necessity which he saw reaching up into heaven with the planets
revolving around it in whorls of graduated width and speed, yet all
concentric and so timed that all complete the full circle punctually
together.--"The Spindle turns on the knees of Necessity: and on the rim
of each whorl sits perched a Siren, who goes round with it, hymning a
single note; the eight notes together forming one harmony."

* * * * *

The fable is a pretty one: but Er the Pamphylian comes back to report no
more than the one thing Man already grasps for a certainty amid his
welter of guesswork about the Universe--that its stability rests on
ordered motion--that the "firmament" stands firm on a balance of active
and tremendous forces somehow harmoniously composed. Theology asks "By
_whom_?": Philosophy inclines rather to guess "_How?_" Natural Science,
allowing that these questions are probably unanswerable, contents itself
with mapping and measuring what it can of the various forces. But all
agree about the harmony: and when a Newton discovers a single rule of it
for us, he but makes our assurance surer.

For uncounted centuries before ever hearing of "Gravitation" men knew
of the sun that he rose and set at hours which, though mysteriously
appointed, could be accurately predicted; of the moon that she regularly
waxed and waned, drawing the waters of the earth in a flow and ebb, the
gauge of which and the time-table could be advertised beforehand in the
almanack; of the stars, that they swung as by clockwork around the pole.
Says the son of Sirach concerning them--


At the word of the Holy one they will stand in due order,
And they will not faint in their watches.

So evident is this celestial harmony that men, seeking to account for it
by what was most harmonious in themselves or in their experience,
supposed an actual Music of the Spheres inaudible to mortals; Plato (who
learned of Pythagoras) inventing his Octave of Sirens, spinning in the
whorls