The planet Uranus was discovered by the German-born British astronomer William Herschel (1738–1822). The son of an army musician, Herschel came to England in 1757 to follow a musical career, as teacher, composer and performer, and became organist of a fashionable chapel in Bath. An amateur astronomer, he constructed new and powerful telescopes, grinding the mirrors himself, and it was through one of those that, in 1781, he saw Uranus, the first planet to be discovered since prehistoric times. Fame, and a £200-per-year pension from George III, quickly followed, and Herschel gave up music for full-time astronomy. He developed a theory of the evolution of stars, and was the first to hypothesize that nebulae (misty white patches among the stars, visible through a telescope) were clouds of individual stars, forming separate galaxies.

Uranus takes 84.01 years to orbit the sun. It is an extremely cold planet, and is thought to consist of a rocky core and an ice mantle 8,000 kilometres thick. Nine of its twenty rings were discovered in 1977; the rest were photographed by the Voyager 2 probe in 1986.

Though not a very good poet, Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) was singular in that he wrote a modern epic poem about the progress of science, The Torch-Bearers. In the following extract (heavily indebted to Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues), Noyes imagines Herschel’s thoughts while conducting a concert in Bath.

My periwig’s askew, my ruffle stained

With grease from my new telescope!

                           Ach, to-morrow

How Caroline will be vexed, although she grows

Almost as bad as I, who cannot leave

My workshop for one evening.

                                                 I must give

One last recital at St Margaret’s,

And then – farewell to music.

                                              Who can lead

Two lives at once?

What will they christen it? Ach – not Herschel, no!

Not Georgium Sidus, as I once proposed;

Although he scarce could lose it, as he lost

That world in ’seventy-six.

                                         Indeed, so far

From trying to tax it, he has granted me

How much? – two hundred golden pounds a year,

In the great name of science, – half the cost

Of one state-coach, with all those worlds to win! …

                                            To-night,

– The music carries me back to it again! –

I see beyond this island universe,

Beyond our sun, and all those other suns

That throng the Milky Way, far, far beyond,

A thousand little wisps, faint nebulae,

Luminous fans and milky streaks of fire;

Some like soft brushes of electric mist

Streaming from one bright point; others that spread

And branch, like growing systems; others discrete,

Keen, ripe, with stars in clusters; others drawn back

By central forces into one dense death,

Thence to be kindled into fire, reborn,

And scattered abroad once more in a delicate spray

Faint as the mist by one bright dewdrop breathed

At dawn, and yet a universe like our own;

Each wisp a universe, a vast galaxy

Wide as our night of stars.

                                         The Milky Way

In which our sun is drowned, to these would seem

Less than to us their faintest drift of haze;

Yet we, who are borne on one dark grain of dust

Around one indistinguishable spark

Of star-mist, lost in one lost feather of light,

Can by the strength of our own thought, ascend

Through universe after universe; trace their growth

Through boundless time, their glory, their decay;

And, on the invisible road of law, more firm

Than granite, range through all their length and breadth,

Their height and depth, past, present, and to come.