ns, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire,"

but of "eternal Providence," and "Eden with surpassing glory crowned,"
and "our first parents," and of "salvation," "goodness infinite," of
"wisdom," which when known we need no higher though all the stars we
know by name,--

"All secrets of the deep, all Nature's works,
Or works of God in heaven, or air, or sea."

And yet, thou stricken observer of the heavenly bodies! hadst thou but
known what marvels would be revealed by the power of thy wondrous
instrument after thou should'st be laid lifeless and cold beneath the
marble floor of Sante Croce, at the age of seventy-eight, without a
monument, without even the right of burial in consecrated ground, having
died a prisoner of the Inquisition, yet not without having rendered to
astronomical science services of utmost value,--even thou might have
died rejoicing, as one of the great benefactors of the world. And thy
discoveries shall be forever held in gratitude; they shall herald others
of even greater importance. Newton shall prove that the different
planets are attracted to the sun in the inverse ratio of the squares of
their distances; that the earth has a force on the moon identical with
the force of gravity, and that all celestial bodies, to the utmost
boundaries of space, mutually attract each other; that all particles of
matter are governed by the same law,--the great law of gravitation, by
which "astronomy," in the language of Whewell, "passed from boyhood to
manhood, and by which law the great discoverer added more to the realm
of science than any man before or since his day." And after Newton shall
pass away, honored and lamented, and be buried with almost royal pomp in
the vaults of Westminster, Halley and other mathematicians shall
construct lunar tables, by which longitude shall be accurately measured
on the pathless ocean. Lagrange and Laplace shall apply the Newtonian
theory to determine the secular inequalities of celestial motion; they
shall weigh absolutely the amount of matter in the planets; they shall
show how far their orbits deviate from circles; and they shall enumerate
the cycles of changes detected in the circuit of the moon. Clairaut
shall remove the perplexity occasioned by the seeming discrepancy
between the observed and computed motions of the moon's perigee. Halley
shall demonstrate the importance of observations of the transit of Venus
as the only certain way of obtaining the sun's parallax,