h medals and coins of
every age from Cyrus the younger, and gems and amulets and vases from
the sepulchers of Egyptian Pharaohs coeval with Joseph, and Etruscan
Lucumons that swayed Italy before the Romans,--libraries stored with the
choicest texts of ancient literature,--gardens of rose and orange, and
pomegranate, and myrtle,--the very air you breathe languid with music
and perfume;--such is Florence. But among all its fascinations,
addressed to the sense, the memory, and the heart, there was none to
which I more frequently gave a meditative hour during a year's
residence, than to the spot where Galileo Galilei sleeps beneath the
marble door of Santa Croce; no building on which I gazed with greater
reverence, than I did upon the modest mansion at Arcetri, villa at once
and prison, in which that venerable sage, by command of the Inquisition,
passed the sad closing years of his life. The beloved daughter on whom
he had depended to smooth his passage to the grave, laid there before
him; the eyes with which he had discovered worlds before unknown,
quenched in blindness:

Ahime! quegli occhi si son fatti oscuri,
Che vider piu di tutti i tempi antichi,
E luce fur dei secoli futuri.

That was the house, "where," says Milton (another of those of whom the
world was not worthy), "I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown
old--a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking on astronomy otherwise
than as the Dominican and Franciscan licensers thought."[A] Great
Heavens! what a tribunal, what a culprit, what a crime! Let us thank
God, my Friends, that we live in the nineteenth century. Of all the
wonders of ancient and modern art, statues and paintings, and jewels and
manuscripts,--the admiration and the delight of ages,--there was nothing
which I beheld with more affectionate awe than that poor, rough tube, a
few feet in length,--the work of his own hands,--that very "optic
glass," through which the "Tuscan Artist" viewed the moon,

"At evening, from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,
Rivers, or mountains, in her spotty globe."

that poor little spy-glass (for it is scarcely more) through which the
human eye first distinctly beheld the surface of the moon--first
discovered the phases of Venus, the satellites of Jupiter, and the
seeming handles of Saturn--first penetrated the dusky depths of the
heavens--first pierce