There was, of course, a certain poetic significance in the legend of
"e pur si muove"; and this significance I have endeavoured to retain
without violating historical truth.

In the year of Galileo's death Newton was born, and the subsequent
sections carry the story on to the modern observatory again. The form
I have adopted is a development from that of an earlier book,
"_Tales of the Mermaid Tavern_" where certain poets and
discoverers of another kind were brought together round a central
idea, and their stories told in a combination of narrative and lyrical
verse. "The Torch-Bearers" flowed all the more naturally into a
similar form in view of the fact that Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and many
other pioneers of science wrote a considerable number of poems.
Those imbedded in the works of Kepler--whose blazing and fantastic
genius was, indeed, primarily poetic--are of extraordinary interest. I
was helped, too, in the general scheme by those constant meetings
between science and poetry, of which the most famous and beautiful are
the visit of Sir Henry Wotton to Kepler, and the visit of Milton to
Galileo in prison.

Even if science and poetry were as deadly opposites as the shallow
often affirm, the method and scheme indicated above would at least
make it possible to convey something of the splendour of the long
battle for the light in its most human aspect. Poetry has its own
precision of expression and, in modern times, it has been seeking more
and more for truth, sometimes even at the expense of beauty. It may be
possible to carry that quest a stage farther, to the point where, in
the great rhythmical laws of the universe revealed by science, truth
and beauty are reunited. If poetry can do this, it will not be without
some value to science itself, and it will be playing its part in the