THE TORCH-BEARERS


WATCHERS OF THE SKY



BY

ALFRED NOYES




PREFATORY NOTE

This volume, while it is complete in itself, is also the first of a
trilogy, the scope of which is suggested in the prologue. The story of
scientific discovery has its own epic unity--a unity of purpose and
endeavour--the single torch passing from hand to hand through the
centuries; and the great moments of science when, after long labour,
the pioneers saw their accumulated facts falling into a significant
order--sometimes in the form of a law that revolutionised the whole
world of thought--have an intense human interest, and belong
essentially to the creative imagination of poetry. It is with these
moments that my poem is chiefly concerned, not with any impossible
attempt to cover the whole field or to make a new poetic system, after
the Lucretian model, out of modern science.

The theme has been in my mind for a good many years; and the first