_At the word of the Holy one they will stand in due order, And they will not faint in their watches._
So evident is this celestial harmony that men, seeking to account for it by what was most harmonious in themselves or in their experience, supposed an actual Music of the Spheres inaudible to mortals; Plato (who learned of Pythagoras) inventing his Octave of Sirens, spinning in the whorls of the great planets and intoning as they spin; Chaucer (who learned of Dante and makes the spheres nine) in his _Parliament of Foules_ telling, out of Cicero's _Somnium Scipionis_, how the great Scipio Africanus visited his descendant in a dream and--
_Shewed he him the litel erthe, that heer is, In regard of the hevenes quantit�: And after shewed he him the nyn� sper�s, And after that the melodye herde he That cometh of thilke sper�s thry�s-three That welle is of musicke and melodye In this world heer, and cause of armonye._
While Shakespeare in the last Act of _The Merchant of Venice_ makes all the stars vocal, and not the planets only:
_There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims..._
And Milton in _Arcades_ goes straight back to Plato (save that his spheres are nine, as with Chaucer):
_then listen I To the celestial Sirens' harmony That sit upon the nine enfolded spheres And sing to those that hold the vital shears And turn the adamantine spindle round Of which the fate of gods and men is wound. Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie To lull the daughters of Necessity, And keep unsteady Nature to her law, And the low world in measured motion draw 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._