"Master, have you forgotten Jeppe, your dwarf?"




IX


He was a great magician, Tycho Brahe,
And yet his magic, under changing skies,
Could never change his heart, or touch the hills
Of those far countries with the tints of home.
And, after many a month of wandering,
He came to Prague; and, though with open hands
Rodolphe received him, like an exiled king,
A new Aeneas, exiled for the truth
(For so they called him), none could heal the wounds
That bled within, or lull his grief to sleep
With that familiar whisper of the waves,
Ebbing and flowing around Uraniborg.

Doggedly still he laboured; point by point,
Crept on, with aching heart and burning brain,
Until his table of the stars had reached
The thousand that he hoped, to crown his toil.
But Christine heard him murmuring in the night,
"The work, the work! Not to have lived in vain!
Into whose hands can I entrust it all?
I thought to find him standing by the way,
Waiting to seize the splendour from my hand,