WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Judicial opinions are couched in the language of “logic,” and it may be for the same reason that the astronomer in this poem gains an understanding of the stars through the equations and the numbers: it flatters human longing for certainty and repose.

Whitman might agree with Holmes’ assertion that certainty is illusion and repose is not the destiny of man. The poem’s speaker ultimately seems to accept that the stars can never be fully understood, and knowledge of them is incomplete by definition, but that silence – no verbal explanation at all – is enough to adequately capture their beauty.

The weakness of law as a social force may be a beautiful thing, but words cannot capture the stars' beauty, and words cannot capture the law's beauty.

(SherieGertler, CourtneyDoak, HarryKhanna 28 Mar 2012)