DEDICATION.

...providence will find its closing clause original: "prouidentiam Clausulam desituram"; this completes the sentence from the previous page suggesting that God's providence will eventually bring an end to the "dissonance" of the war. For who could be a more worthy judge of Imperial Goodness than a great King? Whom could I have chosen as a more suitable Patron for a work on the Harmonies of the Heavens—which savors of Pythagoras and Plato—than that King who has testified to his study of Platonic wisdom through his own writings original: "domesticis monumentis"; referring to King James’s published books and treatises, which we even hold in public veneration among your subjects? Who, while still a boy, deemed the Astronomy of Tycho Brahe—upon which this work relies—worthy of the ornaments of his own genius? Who, finally, having become a man and handling the rudders of the kingdom, marked Astrological vanity with public censure? This vanity is clearly exposed in Book IV of this work, where the true foundations of planetary influences are uncovered: so that no one can doubt 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 I first conceived the material for this work and announced its title a little less than twenty years ago—though the specific motions of the Planets were not yet known, in which the instinct of Nature nevertheless dictated that Harmonies were present—even then I destined the patronage of the work for your Majesty, should it ever succeed and be completed. I testified to this, as if it were my vow, to your Ambassadors at the Imperial court once and again.

The causes for thinking of this patronage of my Harmonics were supplied to me by that manifold Dissonance in human affairs, which is indeed so manifest that it cannot fail to offend; yet it is composed of harmonious and articulate intervals, the nature of which is to soothe the hearing in the midst of discord with the promise of a sweet concord to follow, and to sustain it with that same expectation. Truly, it was a persuasion worthy of a Christian man that it is God who moderates the entire Melody of human life; it is a patience worthy of the greatness of God not to be offended by the long duration of dissonances, nor to cast away hope; considering that it is not of God...