Miscellaneous Intelligence. 443 
 raohs coéval with Joseph, and Etruscan Lucumons that swayed Italy 
_ fore the Romans; libraries stored with the choicest texts of ancient lit- 
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 Gal- 
which I gazed with greater reverence, than I did upon the modest man- 
sion 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 
Ahime! quegli occhi si son fatti oscuri, 
Che vider pid di tutti i tempi antichi, 
ey 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 oth- 
0 
2] 6 
wonders of ancient and modern art, statues and paintings, 
ts,—the admiration and the delight of ages,—there was nothing 
afew feet in length,—the work of his own hands,—that very ‘optic 
glass,’ through which the ‘Tuscan Artist’ viewed the moon, N 
‘At evening, from the top of Fiesole, 
Or in Val d’Arno, to descry new % ; 
Rivers, or mountains, in her spotty globe. 
_ That poor little spy-glass (for it is scarcely more) throu 
tan eye first distinctly beheld the surface of the moon 
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. ~ 
* Prose Works, vol. i, p. 213. 
