preacher of justice to pay those who have done him wrong
as a favor. Can I not everywhere behold the mirrors of the sun and
stars? Speculate on sweetest truths under any sky."

Robert Strong said his poetry wuz far finer in the original.

And I said, "Yes, he wuz very original, for Thomas Jefferson always
said so."

He is buried in Ravenna, and the Florentines have begged for his ashes
to rest in Florence. If when they burnt up some of his books to show
their contempt of him they had done as they wanted to, dug up his body
and burnt it, there wouldn't have been any ashes to quarrel about, for
of course scornin' him so they would have cast his ashes to the winds.
But now they worship him when his ear is dead to their praise, the
great heart silent that their love would have made beat with ecstasy.
Well, such is life. They treated Tasso just about the same who writ
"Jerusalem Delivered," they imprisoned him for a lunatic, and now how
much store they set by him.

And I had these same thoughts, only more extreme ones, as we stood in
the cell of that noble preacher of righteousness and denouncer of sin,
Savonarola. He wuz so adored by the populace, and so great a crowd
pressed to see him to kiss his robe and applaud him, that he had to
have a guard. And then this same adoring crowd turned against him,
imprisoned him for heresy, tortured him, burnt him to the stake. And
when he stood on the fagots, which wuz to be his funeral bed of flame,
and the bishop said to him:

"I excommunicate you from the church militant," he answered: "Thou
canst not separate me from the Church Triumphant."

A great life and a great death. I thought of this a sight as I looked
on his tomb. I sot store by Mr. Savonarola.

In the Church of Sante Croce we see the tomb of Machiavelli, a very
wise, deep man and a wise patriot, but a man lied about the worst kind
by them that hate liberty; the tomb of the poet, Alfieri, with Italy
weepin' over it; the tombs of Michael Angelo and Galileo; the mother
of the Bonapartes, and many, many others. Galileo's monument wuz a
sizeable one, but none too big for the man who discovered the
telescope and the motion of the earth. But just as the way of the
world is because he found new stars and insisted that the earth did
move, his enemies multiplied, he wuz persecuted and imprisoned. I sot
great store by him, and so did Robert Strong, and I sez to him,
"Robert, you too are discovering new and radiant stars in y