feel.  The most practical of men and women can really only live in those ideas which are deemed indefinite and unreal.  For what do the busiest of you run away from money-making, and ride in cold or heat, in dreariness or discomfort,—­dinners, or greetings of love and sympathy?  On what are such festivals as Christmas and Thanksgiving Day based?—­on consecrated sentiments that have more force than any material gains or ends.  These, after all, are realities to you as much as ideas were to Plato, or music to Beethoven, or patriotism to Washington.  Deny these as the higher certitudes, and you rob the soul of its dignity, and life of its consolations.

AUTHORITIES.

Bacon’s Works, edited by Basil Montagu; Bacon’s Life, by Basil
Montagu; Bacon’s Life, by James Spedding; Bacon’s Life, by Thomas
Fowler; Dr. Abbott’s Introduction to Bacon’s Essays, in
Contemporary Review, 1876; Macaulay’s famous essay in Edinburgh
Review, 1839; Archbishop Whately’s annotations of the Essays of
Bacon; the general Histories of England.

GALILEO.

A. D. 1564-1642.

Astronomical discoveries.

Among the wonders of the sixteenth century was the appearance of a new star in the northern horizon, which, shining at first with a feeble light, gradually surpassed the brightness of the planet Jupiter; and then changing its color from white to yellow and from yellow to red, after seventeen months, faded away from the sight, and has not since appeared.  This celebrated star, first seen by Tycho Brahe in the constellation Cassiopeia, never changed its position, or presented the slightest perceptible parallax.  It could not therefore have been a meteor, nor a planet regularly revolving round the sun, nor a comet blazing with fiery nebulous light, nor a satellite of one of the planets, but a fixed star, far beyond our solar system.  Such a phenomenon created an immense sensation, and has never since been satisfactorily explained by philosophers.  In the infancy of astronomical science it was regarded by astrologers as a sign to portend the birth of an extraordinary individual.

Though the birth of some great political character was supposed to be heralded by this mysterious star, its prophetic meaning might with more propriety apply to the extraordinary man who astonished his contemporaries by discoveries in the heavens, and who forms the subject of this lecture; or it poetically might apply to the brilliancy of the century itself in which it appeared.  The sixteenth century cannot be compared with the nineteenth century in the variety and scope of scientific discoveries; but, compared with the ages which had preceded it, it was a memorable epoch, marked by the simultaneous breaking up of the darkness of mediaeval Europe, and the bursting forth of new energies in all departments of human thought and action.