After the heavenly tune._

From the greater poets let us turn to a lesser one, whom we shall have
occasion to quote again by and by: to the _Orchestra_ of Sir John Davies
(1596), who sees this whole Universe treading the harmonious measures of
a dance; and let us select one stanza, of the tides:

_For lo, the sea that fleets about the land,
And like a girdle clips her solid waist,
Music and Measure both doth understand;
For his great Crystal Eye is always cast
Up to the Moon, and on her fix�d fast;
And as she daunceth in her pallid sphere,
So daunceth he about the centre here._

This may be fantastic. As the late Professor Skeat informed the world
solemnly in a footnote, "Modern astronomy has exploded the singular
notion of revolving hollow concentric spheres...." (The Professor wrote
"singular" when he meant "curious."--The notion was never "singular.")
"These 'spheres,'" he adds, "have disappeared, and their music with
them, except in poetry." Nevertheless the fable presents a truth, and
one of the two most important truths in the world. This Universe is not
a Chaos. (If it were, by the way, we should be unable to reason about it
at all.) It stands and is continually renewed upon an ascertained
harmony: and what Plato called "Necessity" is the duty in all things of
obedience to that harmony, the Duty of which Wordsworth sings in his
noble Ode,

_Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And his most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong._