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 coeval 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 piu 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 Fesole,
               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.]