distance due and comely Majesty;
And round their lordly seats their servants hie
Keeping a well-proportionated space
One from another, doing chearfully
Their dayly task. No blemmish may deface
The worlds in severall deckt with all art and grace.

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But the appearance of the nightly starres
Is but the by-work of each neighbour sun;
Wherefore lesse marvell if it lightly shares
Of neater Art; and what proportion
Were fittest for to distance one from one
(Each world I mean from other) is not clear.
Wherefore it must remain as yet unknown
Why such perplexed distances appear
Mongst the dispersed lights in Heaven thrown here & there.

57

Again, that eminent similitude
Betwixt the starres and Phoebus fixed light,
They being both with steddinesse indu'd,
No whit removing whence they first were pight,
No serious man will count a reason slight
To prove them both, both fixed suns and starres
And Centres all of severall worlds by right,
For right it is that none a sun debarre
Of Planets which his just and due retinue are.

58

If starres be merely starres not centrall lights
Why swell they into so huge bignesses?
For many (as Astronomers do write)
Our sun in bignesse many times surpasse.
If both their number and their bulks were lesse
Yet lower placed, light and influence
Would flow as powerfully, and the bosome presse
Of the impregned Earth, that fruit from hence
As fully would arise, and lordly affluence.

59

Wherefore these fixed Fires mainly attend
Their proper charge in their own Universe,
And onely by the by of court'sie lend
Light to our world, as our world doth reverse
His thankfull rayes so farre as he can pierce
Back unto other worlds. But farre aboven
Further then furthest thought of man can traverse,
Still are new worlds aboven and still aboven.
In the endlesse hollow Heaven, and each world hath his sun.

60

An hint of this we have in winter-nights,
When reason may see clearer then our eye,
Small subtil starres appear unto our sights
As thick as pin-dust scattered in the skie.
Here we accuse our seeing facultie
Of weaknesse, and our sense of foul deceit,
We do accuse and yet we know not why.
But the plain truth is, from a vaster hight
The numerous upper worlds amaze our dazzled sight.

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