WATCHERS OF THE SKY by Alfred Noyes

Wonderful poetry about scientific discovery and astronomy, humanising the old scientists who watched the sky and gave knowledge to future generations.

Truth, Celeste,
Truth and its laws are constant, even up there;
That's where one man may face and fight the world.
His weakness turns to strength. He is made one
With universal forces, and he holds
The password to eternity.
Gate after gate swings back through all the heavens.
No sentry halts him, and no flaming sword.
Say truth, Celeste, not fame."
"No, for I'll say
A better word," I told him. "I'll say love."
He took my face between his hands and said—
His face all dark between me and the stars—
"What's love, Celeste, but this dear face of truth
Upturned to heaven."

There is the dying Copernicus, hoping to once touch his book of discoveries; Tycho Brahe nine miles from Elsinore with his golden nose and fair Christine; Kepler and his salad-making wife; Galileo fighting the church; and Newton resolving rainbows and gravitational pulls. The prologue is the observatory, and William Herschel conducts and John Herschel remembers. Then in the epilogue the planets sing...

A magnificent intersection where the wonders of history and science and language meet, an extended discourse of the meaning of being human and looking up at the stars.

HEAD OF THE HOUSE OF COOMBE and ROBIN by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Both were released in 1922 - Head, Robin. The Head of the House of Coombe is a marquis who was born in Victorian days and is an intensely intelligent cynic out of step with his era. Robin, the heroine, is a neglected child raised in utter isolation in a small dark attic in a fashionable street in London. She has never had anyone but the sparrows.

I didn't have the heart to snip bits out of this lengthy quote.

The sparrows this morning were quarrelsome and suddenly engaged in a fight, pecking each other furiously, beating their wings and uttering shrill, protesting chipperings. Robin did not quite understand what they were doing and stood watching them with spellbound interest.

It was while she watched them that she heard footsteps on the gravel walk which stopped near her and made her look up to see who was at her side. A big boy in Highland kilts and bonnet and sporan was standing by her, and she found herself staring into a pair of handsome deep blue eyes, blue like the waters of a hillside tarn. They were wide, glowing, friendly eyes and none like them had ever looked into hers before. He seemed to her to be a very big boy indeed, and in fact, he was unusually tall and broad for his age, but he was only eight years old and a simple enough child pagan. Robin's heart began to beat as it did when she watched the Lady Downstairs, but there was something different in the beating. It was something which made her red mouth spread and curve itself into a smile which showed all her small teeth.

So they stood and stared at each other and for some strange, strange reason—created, perhaps, with the creating of Man and still hidden among the deep secrets of the Universe—they were drawn to each other—wanted each other—knew each other. Their advances were, of course, of the most primitive—as primitive and as much a matter of instinct as the nosing and sniffing of young animals. He spread and curved his red mouth and showed the healthy whiteness of his own handsome teeth as she had shown her smaller ones. Then he began to run and prance round in a circle, capering like a Shetland pony to exhibit at once his friendliness and his prowess. He tossed his curled head and laughed to make her laugh also, and she not only laughed but clapped her hands. He was more beautiful than anything she had ever seen before in her life, and he was plainly trying to please her. No child creature had ever done anything like it before, because no child creature had ever been allowed by Andrews to make friends with her. He, on his part, was only doing what any other little boy animal would have done—expressing his child masculinity by "showing off" before a little female. But to this little female it had never happened before.

It was all beautifully elemental. As does not too often happen, two souls as well as two bodies were drawn towards each other by the Magnet of Being. When he had exhibited himself for a minute or two he came back to her, breathing fast and glowing.

"My pony in Scotland does that. His name is Chieftain. He is a Shetland pony and he is only that high," he measured forty inches from the ground. "I'm called Donal. What are you called?"

"Robin," she answered, her lips and voice trembling with joy...

Robin leaned against the bench and looked on enthralled. She had never been happy before in the entire course of her brief existence. She had not known or expected and conditions other than those she was familiar with—the conditions of being fed and clothed, kept clean and exercised, but totally unloved and unentertained. She did not even know that this nearness to another human creature, the exchange of companionable looks, which were like flashes of sunlight, the mutual outbreaks of child laughter and pleasure were happiness. To her, what she felt, the glow and delight of it, had no name but she wanted it to go on and on, never to be put an end to.

There's emotional intensity, Christian Science, mysticism, love, the remnants of Edwardian and late Victorian society, melodrama, the deluge of the Great War.

And there is also the reader's dread foreknowledge that, twenty-one years later, there will come another...

These books are melodramatic, but they make a suspenseful romance. There's some historical interest in them. The writing is heavily influenced by World War I, but unlike other patriotic literature Burnett refuses to demonise all Germans. The individual German characters appearing in the novel are all evil, but nevertheless there's the overall impression that there were German sons and daughters and mothers and fathers who sorrowed as much from the war as the main characters. The Christian Science viewpoint is somewhat heavily pushed in the second book in particular, but I felt that it worked reasonably well as a fictional construct for the readers who don't believe in it.

Well worth a read, especially if you're interested in Frances Hodgson Burnett's adult-intended writing. Not her best, but a gripping read if you've the frame of mind for it.