Given my great love of literature, art, music, and so many other of the humanist, liberal studies which delight others in the academy, I sometimes sadden a bit that my own chosen field, physics, is less immediately delightful and often merely frustrating. But this morning I remembered this poem by George Meredith and was reminded that, in studying natural Philosophy, I at least am concerned with an arena that is wholly God’s, where His will is being worked out in all its delightful precision and beauty; and that is a consoling thought.

Lucifer in Starlight

ON a starr’d night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screen’d,
Where sinners hugg’d their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he lean’d,
Now his huge bulk o’er Afric’s sands careen’d,
Now the black planet shadow’d Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that prick’d his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reach’d a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he look’d, and sank.
Around the ancient track march’d, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.