Crüger to Müller, Easter Monday 1631
Peter Crüger, “Crüger to Müller, Easter Monday 1631,” Nova Kepleriana 4, 1631, 110, transcribed in Plain Old Text, https://sources.vjbe.net/stable/hxh6p.
Nova Kepleriana 4 1631, p. 110 Summary
Part of Die Keplerbriefe auf der Nationalbibliothek und auf der Sternwarte in Paris
Crüger mourns Kepler, regretting the unfinished works he had promised, and declines to write a funeral poem.
Source: Peter Crüger's letter to Philipp Müller of Easter Monday 1631, written at Danzig after the news of Kepler's death had reached him. Müller quoted its second passage in his letter to Jacob Bartsch of 8 May 1631. The original is in the Bibliothèque de l'Observatoire, Paris (B, 1, 9; 89, 9. R. 39). Printed in extracts in Nova Kepleriana 4, ed. Walther von Dyck and Max Caspar, Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Math.-naturw. Abteilung 31, no. 1 (Munich, 1927), 110.
Transcribed from: the page images of the 1927 printing.
Only the Latin is given; the editors’ German commentary and notes are left out. The 1927 edition prints only extracts. Each paragraph below is one of its extracts, and the omission marks (…) are the editors’. Spaced type, which the editors used for emphasis, is given in italics.
English translation of the Latin extracts printed in Nova Kepleriana 4 (1927), made for Plain Old Text. Each paragraph translates the corresponding extract of the original; the omission marks (…) are the 1927 editors’.
… Sequar Filum Epistolae Tuae, quod incipit ab Obitu Viri omnibus Astronomis suspiciendi Keppleri. Primus ea de re mihi rumor vagus nec fide tum dignus. Secutae sunt ad me literae Laubani e Silesia: nec sic quidem plenam adhibui fidem. At postquam idem Tuae nunciarunt, jam quasi oculatae factae sunt manus meae. Sane quod ex animo doleamus, habemus, ob incomparabile ingenium et ob residua reique publicae promissa Opera, praesertim Hipparchum,Kepler's planned Hipparchus, on the sizes and distances of the sun, moon and earth, never finished. Fundamenta Rudolphinarum, et Observationes Brahei. Multa sunt nempe in Rudolphinis, quorum calculus mihi quidem apprehensu facilis, at ratio calculi non patet. …
… I shall follow the thread of your letter, which begins with the death of Kepler, a man for all astronomers to look up to. The first I heard of it was a vague rumour, not then worth believing. Then came letters to me from Lauban in Silesia, and even then I did not quite believe it. But now that yours have brought the same news, my hands have, as it were, become eyewitnesses.After Plautus, Asinaria 202: “our hands always have eyes; they believe what they see.” Truly we have reason to grieve from the heart, for his incomparable genius and for the works he left unfinished and had promised the public, above all the HipparchusKepler's planned Hipparchus, on the sizes and distances of the sun, moon and earth, never finished., the Foundations of the Rudolphine Tables, and Brahe’s observations. For there is much in the Rudolphine Tables whose computation I find easy to grasp, but whose reasoning is not clear to me. …
Ut maximopere doleam, Virum ante perfectionem desideratissimorum operum nobis ereptum. Caeterum quod mihi copiam Musarum in promptu esse putas ad condecorandum defuncti tumulum, errare te doleo …
So that I grieve most deeply that the man was taken from us before he had finished the works we so longed for. As for your thinking that I have a store of the Muses at hand to adorn the dead man’s tomb, I am sorry to say you are mistaken …