iron chains. He wishes that these chains may
be placed in his coffin, for they witness of the world, and of the way
in which a man's contemporaries reward good service.

One picture after another comes crowding on; the thorny path of honour
and of fame is over-filled.

Here in dark night sits the man who measured the mountains in the
moon; he who forced his way out into the endless space, among stars
and planets; he, the mighty man who understood the spirit of nature,
and felt the earth moving beneath his feet--Galileo. Blind and deaf he
sits--an old man thrust through with the spear of suffering, and amid
the torments of neglect, scarcely able to lift his foot--that foot
with which, in the anguish of his soul, when men denied the truth, he
stamped upon the ground with the exclamation, "_Yet_ it moves!"

Here stands a woman of childlike mind, yet full of faith and
inspiration; she carries the banner in front of the combating army,
and brings victory and salvation to her fatherland. The sound of
shouting arises, and the pile flames up: they are burning the witch,
Joan of Arc. Yes, and a future century jeers at the white lily.
Voltaire, the satyr of human intellect, writes "_La Pucelle_."

At the _Thing_ or assembly at Viborg, the Danish nobles burn the laws
of the king--they flame up high, illuminating the period and the
lawgiver, and throw a glory into the dark prison tower, where an old
man is growing grey and bent. With his finger he marks out a groove in
the stone table. It is the popular king who sits there, once the ruler
of three kingdoms, the friend of the citizen and the peasant: it is
Christian the Second. Enemies wrote his history. Let us remember his
improvements of seven and twenty years, if we cannot forget his crime.

A ship sails away, quitting the Danish shores; a man leans against the
mast, casting a last glance towards the Island Hueen. It is Tycho
Brahe. He raised the name of Denmark to the stars, and was rewarded
with injury, loss, and sorrow. He is going to a strange country.

"The vault of heaven is above me everywhere," he says, "and what do I
want more?" And away sails the famous Dane, the astronomer, to live
honoured and free in a strange land.

"Ay, free, if only from the unbearable sufferings of the body!" comes
in a sigh through time, and strikes upon our ear. What a picture!
Griffenfeldt, a Danish Prometheus, bound to the rocky island of
Munkholm.

We are in America, on the margin