Poetry and Science
Not all the suns that throng the soundless spaces
Are worth the radiance of one loving heart;
The least and humblest of all human faces
Hath nobler import in the eyes of Art.
Gaze through your glass till ye be stricken with blindness!
Peer at the heavens whose bright star-clusters gleam!
One human heart that glows with loving-kindness
Outshines the stars, and makes your heavens a dream.
Fair Science trumpets her own praise so loudly
She fails to catch creation's under-tune;
But listening Art, who walks the earth less proudly,
Can hear — while Science quarries in the moon.
What is it worth to know the leagues that sever
Our green-grassed earth from Sirius or from Mars?
The skies are lampless wastes, if we for ever
Must cease to tell our fortunes by the stars!
If darkness' doors were sundered, and we knew them,
Gold star by star deploying from the deep, —
If we could muster and rank by rank review them,
Would it be worth one gift of white-armed Sleep?
Love ruled the past, and love will rule the ages
Unseen, unknown, the summers yet to be:
In spite of Science' wand the storm-wind rages,
But Venus' touch wrought magic on the sea.
We need not Science' barge, slow-sailed and lumbering,
To bear us o'er the ocean of the past;
It is enough to know that earth, long slumbering,
At love's touch woke to passionate life at last.
I'd surely choose, had I the choice, to follow,
When morning thrills the dazzled air with pride,
Along heaven's heights the footsteps of Apollo
Rather than Proctor's, though his path be wide.
Of Grimm and Andersen no heart could weary;
We turned to another when each tale was done:
But now we yawn, and feel that earth grows dreary,
While Norman Lockyer lectures on the sun.
Give me the days of faith, and not of Science!
Give me the days of faith in unseen things!
The days of self-doubt, not of self-reliance:
Days when the rainbow flashed from fairy wings.
Knowledge hath little worth, if dreams are going.
Let me watch in the stream the Naiad's hair;
Or wander forth when balmy winds are blowing
Through sunlit groves, and find sweet Daphne there.
To know is well, but not to know is better.
'Tis ignorance that makes the child sublime.
To learn new facts adds fetter unto fetter
For all the already weary sons of time.
We count the stars, — yet dream not what we are losing,
Aye, losing all of us, the whole wise race,
In that no more among the reed-beds musing
Shall we see Pan's half-human wrinkled face.
Are worth the radiance of one loving heart;
The least and humblest of all human faces
Hath nobler import in the eyes of Art.
Gaze through your glass till ye be stricken with blindness!
Peer at the heavens whose bright star-clusters gleam!
One human heart that glows with loving-kindness
Outshines the stars, and makes your heavens a dream.
Fair Science trumpets her own praise so loudly
She fails to catch creation's under-tune;
But listening Art, who walks the earth less proudly,
Can hear — while Science quarries in the moon.
What is it worth to know the leagues that sever
Our green-grassed earth from Sirius or from Mars?
The skies are lampless wastes, if we for ever
Must cease to tell our fortunes by the stars!
If darkness' doors were sundered, and we knew them,
Gold star by star deploying from the deep, —
If we could muster and rank by rank review them,
Would it be worth one gift of white-armed Sleep?
Love ruled the past, and love will rule the ages
Unseen, unknown, the summers yet to be:
In spite of Science' wand the storm-wind rages,
But Venus' touch wrought magic on the sea.
We need not Science' barge, slow-sailed and lumbering,
To bear us o'er the ocean of the past;
It is enough to know that earth, long slumbering,
At love's touch woke to passionate life at last.
I'd surely choose, had I the choice, to follow,
When morning thrills the dazzled air with pride,
Along heaven's heights the footsteps of Apollo
Rather than Proctor's, though his path be wide.
Of Grimm and Andersen no heart could weary;
We turned to another when each tale was done:
But now we yawn, and feel that earth grows dreary,
While Norman Lockyer lectures on the sun.
Give me the days of faith, and not of Science!
Give me the days of faith in unseen things!
The days of self-doubt, not of self-reliance:
Days when the rainbow flashed from fairy wings.
Knowledge hath little worth, if dreams are going.
Let me watch in the stream the Naiad's hair;
Or wander forth when balmy winds are blowing
Through sunlit groves, and find sweet Daphne there.
To know is well, but not to know is better.
'Tis ignorance that makes the child sublime.
To learn new facts adds fetter unto fetter
For all the already weary sons of time.
We count the stars, — yet dream not what we are losing,
Aye, losing all of us, the whole wise race,
In that no more among the reed-beds musing
Shall we see Pan's half-human wrinkled face.
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