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The Observatory

by Alfred Noyes

At noon, upon the mountain's purple height,

Above the pine-woods and the clouds it shone

No larger than the small white dome of shell

Left by the fledgling wren when wings are born.

By night it joined the company of heaven,

And, with its constant light, became a star.

A needle-point of light, minute, remote,

It sent a subtler message through the abyss,

Held more significance for the seeing eye

Than all the darkness that would blot it out,

Yet could not dwarf it.

High in heaven it shone,

Alive with all the thoughts, and hopes, and dreams

Of man's adventurous mind.

Up there, I knew

The explorers of the sky, the pioneers

Of science, now made ready to attack

That darkness once again, and win new worlds.

To-morrow night they hoped to crown the toil

Of twenty years, and turn upon the sky

The noblest weapon ever made by man.

War had delayed them. They had been drawn away

Designing darker weapons. But no gun

Could outrange this.

"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

Above the clouds, where that white dome of shell,

No wren's now, but an eagle's, took the flush

Of dying day. The sage-brush all died out,

And all the southern growths, and round us now,

Firs of the north, and strong, storm-rooted pines

Exhaled a keener fragrance; till, at last,

Reversing all the laws of lesser hills,

They towered like giants round us. Darkness fell

Before we reached the mountain's naked height.

Over us, like some great cathedral dome,

The observatory loomed against the sky;

And the dark mountain with its headlong gulfs

Had lost all memory of the world below;

For all those cloudless throngs of glittering stars

And all those glimmerings where the abyss of space

Is powdered with a milky dust, each grain

A burning sun, and every sun the lord

Of its own darkling planets,--all those lights

Met, in a darker deep, the lights of earth,

Lights on the sea, lights of invisible towns,

Trembling and indistinguishable from stars,

In those black gulfs around the mountain's feet.

Then, into the glimmering dome, with bated breath,

We entered, and, above us, in the gloom

Saw that majestic weapon of the light

Uptowering like the shaft of some huge gun

Through one arched rift of sky.

Dark at its base

With naked arms, the crew that all day long

Had sweated to make ready for this night

Waited their captain's word.

The switchboard shone

With elfin lamps of white and red, and keys

Whence, at a finger's touch, that monstrous tube

Moved like a creature dowered with life and will,

To peer from deep to deep.

Below it pulsed

The clock-machine that slowly, throb by throb,

Timed to the pace of the revolving earth,

Drove the titanic muzzle on and on,

Fixed to the chosen star that else would glide

Out of its field of vision.

So, set free

Balanced against the wheel of time, it swung,

Or rested, while, to find new realms of sky

The dome that housed it, like a moon revolved,

So smoothly that the watchers hardly knew

They moved within; till, through the glimmering doors,

They saw the dark procession of the pines

Like Indian warriors, quietly stealing by.

Then, at a word, the mighty weapon dipped

Its muzzle and aimed at one small point of light

One seeming insignificant star.

The chief,

Mounting the ladder, while we held our breath,

Looked through the eye-piece.

Then we heard him laugh

His thanks to God, and hide it in a jest.

"A prominence on Jupiter!"--

They laughed,

"What do you mean?"--"It's moving," cried the chief,

They laughed again, and watched his glimmering face

High overhead against that moving tower.

"Come up and see, then!"

One by one they went,

And, though each laughed as he returned to earth,

Their souls were in their eyes.

Then I, too, looked,

And saw that insignificant spark of light

Touched with new meaning, beautifully reborn,

A swimming world, a perfect rounded pearl,

Poised in the violet sky; and, as I gazed,

I saw a miracle,--right on its upmost edge

A tiny mound of white that slowly rose,

Then, like an exquisite seed-pearl, swung quite clear

And swam in heaven above its parent world

To greet its three bright sister-moons.

A moon,

Of Jupiter, no more, but clearer far

Than mortal eyes had seen before from earth,

O, beautiful and clear beyond all dreams

Was that one silver phrase of the starry tune

Which Galileo's "old discoverer" first

Dimly revealed, dissolving into clouds

The imagined fabric of our universe.

"Jupiter stands in heaven and will stand

Though all the sycophants bark at him," he cried,

Hailing the truth before he, too, went down,

Whelmed in the cloudy wreckage of that dream.

So one by one we looked, the men who served

Urania, and the men from Vulcan's forge.

A beautiful eagerness in the darkness lit

The swarthy faces that too long had missed

A meaning in the dull mechanic maze

Of labour on this blind earth, but found it now.

Though only a moment's wandering melody

Hopelessly far above, it gave their toil

Its only consecration and its joy.

There, with dark-smouldering eyes and naked throats,

Blue-dungareed, red-shirted, grimed and smeared

With engine-grease and sweat, they gathered round

The foot of that dim ladder; each muttering low

As he came down, his wonder at what he saw

To those who waited,--a picture for the brush

Of Rembrandt, lighted only by the rift

Above them, where the giant muzzle thrust

Out through the dim arched roof, and slowly throbbed,

Against the slowly moving wheel of the earth,

Holding their chosen star.

There, like an elf,

Perched on the side of that dark slanting tower

The Italian mechanician watched the moons,

That Italy discovered.

One by one,

American, English, French, and Dutch, they climbed

To see the wonder that their own blind hands

Had helped to achieve.

At midnight while they paused

To adjust the clock-machine, I wandered out

Alone, into the silence of the night.

The silence? On that lonely height I heard

Eternal voices;

For, as I looked into the gulf beneath,

Whence almost all the lights had vanished now,

The whole dark mountain seemed to have lost its earth

And to be sailing like a ship through heaven.

All round it surged the mighty sea-like sound

Of soughing pine-woods, one vast ebb and flow

Of absolute peace, aloof from all earth's pain,

So calm, so quiet, it seemed the cradle-song,

The deep soft breathing of the universe

Over its youngest child, the soul of man.

And, as I listened, that Aeolian voice

Became an invocation and a prayer:

O you, that on your loftier mountain dwell

And move like light in light among the thoughts

Of heaven, translating our mortality

Into immortal song, is there not one

Among you that can turn to music now

This long dark fight for truth? Not one to touch

With beauty this long battle for the light,

This little victory of the spirit of man

Doomed to defeat--for what was all we saw

To that which neither eyes nor soul could see?--

Doomed to defeat and yet unconquerable,

Climbing its nine miles nearer to the stars.

Wars we have sung. The blind, blood-boltered kings

Move with an epic music to their thrones.

Have you no song, then, of that nobler war?

Of those who strove for light, but could not dream

Even of this victory that they helped to win,

Silent discoverers, lonely pioneers,

Prisoners and exiles, martyrs of the truth

Who handed on the fire, from age to age;

Of those who, step by step, drove back the night

And struggled, year on year, for one more glimpse

Among the stars, of sovran law, their guide;

Of those who searching inward, saw the rocks

Dissolving into a new abyss, and saw

Those planetary systems far within,

Atoms, electrons, whirling on their way

To build and to unbuild our solid world;

Of those who conquered, inch by difficult inch,

The freedom of this realm of law for man;

Dreamers of dreams, the builders of our hope,

The healers and the binders up of wounds,

Who, while the dynasts drenched the world with blood,

Would in the still small circle of a lamp

Wrestle with death like Heracles of old

To save one stricken child.

Is there no song

To touch this moving universe of law

With ultimate light, the glimmer of that great dawn

Which over our ruined altars yet shall break

In purer splendour, and restore mankind

From darker dreams than even Lucretius knew

To vision of that one Power which guides the world.

How should men find it? Only through those doors

Which, opening inward, in each separate soul

Give each man access to that Soul of all

Living within each life, not to be found

Or known, till, looking inward, each alone

Meets the unknowable and eternal God.

And there was one that moved like light in light

Before me there,--Love, human and divine,

That can exalt all weakness into power,--

Whispering, Take this deathless torch of song...

Whispering, but with such faith, that even I

Was humbled into thinking this might be

Through love, though all the wisdom of the world

Account it folly.

Let my breast be bared

To every shaft, then, so that Love be still

My one celestial guide the while I sing

Of those who caught the pure Promethean fire

One from another, each crying as he went down

To one that waited, crowned with youth and joy,--

Take thou the splendour, carry it out of sight

Into the great new age I must not know,

Into the great new realm I must not tread.