The Centaur's first love
Bookplate of Campbell Dodgson
a small collection HERE
Value and Extent
The more they peer through lenses at the night,
The finer they split the rays of stellar light,
The vaster their estimates
Of distances, of movements, and of weights!
The stupor of this unimagined size
Like a mole’s eyelid palls the keenest eyes.
Yea, like unearthed moles,
We, by truth tortured, writhe outside those holes…
Dark homely galleries of confined thought,
Whose utmost reach must now be held as naught
Compared with that grand space
Which those unlike us may superbly grace.
Substance more subtle, forms of comelier growth,
Diviner minds, nothing but mental sloth
Prevents me thus to bid
Against the size revealed, with worth still hid.
No reason can be urged why all this room
Should hold no more life than, within a tomb,
The first small worm that stirs;
For all known life is less in the universe.
Undreamable communications, sun
To sun, may be the hourly routes they run,
Swifter even than light,
On business purer than a child’s delight!
But that I can, like scornful Plato, fear
Our fine things but poor copies of true worth;
Proportioned to this earth,
There thrill and shape small genuine glories here.
The more they peer through lenses at the night,
The finer they split the rays of stellar light,
The vaster their estimates
Of distances, of movements, and of weights!
The stupor of this unimagined size
Like a mole’s eyelid palls the keenest eyes.
Yea, like unearthed moles,
We, by truth tortured, writhe outside those holes…
Dark homely galleries of confined thought,
Whose utmost reach must now be held as naught
Compared with that grand space
Which those unlike us may superbly grace.
Substance more subtle, forms of comelier growth,
Diviner minds, nothing but mental sloth
Prevents me thus to bid
Against the size revealed, with worth still hid.
No reason can be urged why all this room
Should hold no more life than, within a tomb,
The first small worm that stirs;
For all known life is less in the universe.
Undreamable communications, sun
To sun, may be the hourly routes they run,
Swifter even than light,
On business purer than a child’s delight!
But that I can, like scornful Plato, fear
Our fine things but poor copies of true worth;
Proportioned to this earth,
There thrill and shape small genuine glories here.
Thomas S Moore
