On this great name, my Friends, assembled as we are to dedicate a temple
to instrumental Astronomy, we may well pause for a moment.
There is much, in every way, in the city of Florence to excite the
curiosity, to kindle the imagination, and to gratify the taste.
Sheltered on the north by the vine-clad hills of Fiesoli, whose
cyclopean walls carry back the antiquary to ages before the Roman,
before the Etruscan power, the flowery city (Fiorenza) covers the sunny
banks of the Arno with its stately palaces. Dark and frowning piles
of mediæval structure; a majestic dome, the prototype of St. Peter's;
basilicas which enshrine the ashes of some of the mightiest of the dead;
the stone where Dante stood to gaze on the Campanile; the house of
Michael Angelo, still occupied by a descendant of his lineage and name,
his hammer, his chisel, his dividers, his manuscript poems, all as if
he had left them but yesterday; airy bridges, which seem not so much to
rest on the earth as to hover over the waters they span; the loveliest
creations of ancient art, rescued from the grave of ages again to
enchant the world; the breathing marbles of Michael Angelo, the glowing
canvas of Raphael and Titian, museums filled with medals and coins of
every age from Cyrus the younger, and gems and amulets and vases from
the sepulchers of Egyptian Pharaohs coëval 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 più 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 Fesolé,
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 pierced the clouds of visual error, which, from the
creation of the world, involved the system of the Universe.
[Footnote A: Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 213.]
There are occasions in life in which a great mind lives years of rapt
enjoyment in a moment. I can fancy the emotions of Galileo, when, first
raising the newly-constructed telescope to the heavens, he saw fulfilled
the grand prophecy of Copernicus, and beheld the planet Venus crescent
like the moon. It was such another moment as that when the immortal
printers of Mentz and Strasburg received the first copy of the Bible
into their hands, the work of their divine art; like that when Columbus,
through the gray dawn of the 12th of October, 1492 (Copernicus, at the
age of eighteen, was then a student at Cracow), beheld the shores of San
Salvador; like that when the law of gravitation first revealed itself to
the intellect of Newton; like that when Franklin saw by the stiffening
fibers of the hempen cord of his kite, that he held the lightning in his
grasp; like that when Leverrier received back from Berlin the tidings
that the predicted planet was found.
Yes, noble Galileo, thou art right, _E pur si muove._ "It does move."
Bigots may make thee recant it; but it moves, nevertheless. Yes, the
earth moves, and the planets move, and the mighty waters move, and the
great sweeping tides of air move, and the empires of men move, and the
world of thought moves, ever onward and upward to higher facts and
bolder theories. The Inquisition may seal thy lips, but they can no more
stop the progress of the great truth propounded by Copernicus, and
demonstrated by thee, than they can stop the revolving earth.
Close now, venerable sage, that sightless, tearful eye; it has seen
what man never before saw--it has seen enough. Hang up that poor
little spy-glass--it has done its work. Not Herschell nor Rosse have,
comparatively, done more. Franciscans and Dominicans deride thy
discoveries now; but the time will come when, from two hundred
observatories in Europe and America, the glorious artillery of science
shall nightly assault the skies, but they shall gain no conquests in
those glittering fields before which thine shall be forgotten. Rest in
peace, great Columbus of the heavens--like him scorned, persecuted,
broken-hearted!--in other ages, in distant hemispheres, when the
votaries of science, with solemn acts of consecration, shall dedicate
their stately edifices to the cause of knowledge and truth, thy name
shall be mentioned with honor.