Miscellaneous Intelligence. 



443 



stately palaces. Dark and frowning piles of mediaeval structure ; a ma- 

 jestic 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 divi- 

 ders, 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 mar* 

 bles of Michael Angelo, the glowing canvas of Raphael and Titian, mu- 

 seums filled with medals and coins of every age from Cyrus the younger, 

 and gems and amulets and vases from the sepulchers of Egyptian Pha- 

 raohs coeval with Joseph, and Etruscan Lucumons that swayed Italy be- 

 fore the Romans ; libraries stored with the choicest texts of ancient lit- 

 erature ; 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 Gal- 

 ileo Galilei sleeps beneath the marble floor of Santa Croce; no building on 

 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 

 to the grave, laid there before him ; the eyes with which he had discos 

 ered 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, 1 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- 

 erwise than as the Dominican and Franciscan licensers thought.'* 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 4 optic 

 glass,' through which the ' Tuscan Artist' viewed the moon, 



' At evening, from the top of Fiesole, 

 Or in Val d'Arno, to descry new lands, 

 Rivers, or mountains, in her spotty globe.' 



That poor little spy-glass (for it is scarcely more) through which the hu- 

 man 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. 



* Prose "Works, vol. i, p. 218. 



