“Why not imprint the book?”
Who serveth least doth make the greatest haste
And, having once discerned some shred of truth,
Is exercised thereby, immediately
To seek the housetop and inform the world.
The highest themes engender large repose,
The heart is fixt in firm serenity
And hastes not till its noble plans mature,
But when the great dynamic hour is come,
It moves with avalanche intensity
To live in the immeasurable years
Where ages are but moments.


Truth needs not
That any man be else than simply true;
Therefore I hasted not when law I learned
Yet found not equity; and medic lore,
But saw results both late and dubious.
My proper science is theology,—
But here, outside the art of kindliness,
Truth-labels on opinions pasted firm
Make up our creed. The priests of science too
Stamp dogmas with the seal of truth, and both
The church and science have their means to curb
Truth inconvenient.


Of all the arts
My thought had tried, none seemed to me more sure
Than mathematics when she stately walked
The pathways of the stars. The spheral ways
Are large. Disposed to such high themes,
The soul is girded with a fine reserve.
A thousand nights looked down upon my heart
And tuned its thought to empyrean tones
While free imagination toured the sky
And mapped the planet's courses, till at last
I found myself on one of them, elate,
Circling the sun.


I saw the earth no more
A centre of the planetary ways,
But moving silent in its cosmic path,
A little sister of great Jupiter.
My ripened age has reached threescore and ten,
And six-and-thirty years have passed since first
I saw the earth a little wanderer
Among the worlds. So now I am resolved
To send the manuscript to Nuremberg
To be imprinted there. My failing powers
Make instant furtherance of this design
Imperative if I would see the book
Before I die.


The mighty hemisphere
Columbus sought and found is better known
To even the very least geographer
Than e'er it was to him who found it first.
So will the key that I shall give to men
Unlock the golden gateway of the skies;
Shall make my thought a pilot through the deep,
And in the coming days a child shall know
The seas of light that float above the world,
The blue, mysterious, oceanic heavens,
More intimately than the Polish priest
Who first discerned how mightily the sun
Leads all his orbs and blazes out their way
Through the stupendous void.