KEPLER 187 



geometers say sweeps out in its revolution equal areas in equal 

 times. This fitted perfectly with his second discovery, that the 

 orbit of the planets was an ellipse. He could now announce the 

 first two of what have ever since been known as Kepler's Laws. 

 This was in 1609, the same year, by chance, that news of a 

 curious optical contrivance in Holland was brought to the ears 

 of Galileo. 



Does the idea lurk anywhere that these world-explorers, 

 reaching, through their studies, to larger and larger views of 

 the cosmic adventure, work on in a cold and bloodless equani- 

 mity, unimpassioned, unmoved ? The stuff that explorers are 

 made of is not this. Perhaps the ultimate spirit of scientific 

 endeavour may best be personified in an image of truth carved 

 of impeccant marble ; the temper of her devotees who have 

 laid at her feet her richest garlands is far otherwise. Discoverers 

 are seers, poets poets in the largest and highest sense. In the 

 flush of divination the hand of Newton trembles, the pen of 

 Kepler sings, \yhen the long nights of vigil, the days of toil, 

 are ended, when success has come, he breaks into rhapsody, in 

 the strain of the Hebrew prophets of old. 



When he had at last worked out the formula which goes by 

 the name of his third law, he was nearing fifty. The volume 

 in which it was announced opens with a burst of poetic splendour 

 as naive as it is rare lines that leap and words that thrill : 



" What I prophesied two-and- twenty years ago, as soon as 

 I discovered the five solids among the heavenly orbits what I 

 firmly believed long before I had seen Ptolemy's Harmonies 

 what I had promised my friends in the title of this book, 1 which 

 I named before I was sure of my discovery what sixteen years 

 ago I urged as a thing to be sought that for which I joined 

 Tycho Brahe, for which I settled in Prague, for which I have 

 devoted the best part of my life to astronomical contemplations, 

 at length I have brought to light, and recognised its truth 

 beyond my most sanguine expectations. It is not eighteen 

 months since I got the first glimpse of light, three months since 

 the dawn, very few days since the unveiled sun, most admirable 

 to gaze upon, burst upon me. Nothing holds me ; I will in- 

 dulge my sacred fury ; I will triumph over mankind by the 

 honest confession that I have stolen the golden vases of the 

 Egyptians to build up a tabernacle for my God far away from 

 1 Harmonices Mundi (1619), Introduction. 



