D E D I C A T I O N .

[to be] a most sweet closing original: "suauissimam Clausulam." This completes the sentence begun on the previous page.. Indeed, whom could I judge a more worthy estimator of Imperial Goodness than a great King? Whom could I have chosen as a more fitting Patron for a work on the Harmony of the Heavens—redolent of Pythagoras and Plato—than that King who has testified to his study of Platonic wisdom in his own writings original: "domesticis monumentis." This refers to King James I’s published literary and philosophical works., which we even hold in public for the veneration of his subjects? [A King] who, while still a boy, judged the Astronomy of Tycho Brahe Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), the Danish astronomer whose meticulous data Kepler used to derive his laws of planetary motion. James I had visited Tycho at his observatory, Uraniborg, in 1590., upon which this work rests, to be worthy of the ornaments of his own genius? [A King] who, finally, having become a man and holding the rudders of his kingdom, noted the vanity of Astrology with public censure? Which vanity, truly, is most clearly exposed in Book IV of this work, where the true foundations of the effects of the stars are uncovered: so that it can be a doubt to no one that you will be the most intelligent judge of this whole Work and all its parts.

But a greater cause for this dedication comes to me from long ago. When first, a little less than twenty? The source text has a burn mark partially obscuring "paulò" (a little), but the context refers to the roughly twenty years since Kepler's first major work, the Mysterium Cosmographicum. years ago, I conceived the material of this work in my mind and named its title—the specific motions of the Planets not yet being known, in which, however, an instinct of Nature dictated that Harmonies were present—even then I destined the patronage of the work to Your Majesty, if it should ever succeed and be completed; and this, as if it were my vow, I testified once and again to your Ambassadors at the Imperial court.

The reasons for thinking of this patronage of my Harmonies were supplied to me by that manifold Dissonance in human affairs, manifest indeed, so that it cannot but offend; yet fused together from concordant and articulate intervals, the nature of which is such that it soothes the hearing in the midst of discord with the promise of a following sweet concord, and sustains it with that same expectation. For truly, it was a persuasion worthy of a Christian man that there is a God who moderates every Melody of human life; it is a patience worthy of the greatness of God not to be offended by the length of dissonances, nor to cast away hope; reflecting that [it is] not God...