n Menlo Park
that the electric light had at last been developed into a commercial
success, do you suppose those bright rays failed to illuminate the
inmost recesses of his soul? Edward Everett said: "There are occasions
in life in which a great mind lives years of enjoyment in a single
moment. I can fancy the emotion of Galileo when, first raising the
newly constructed telescope to the heavens, he saw fulfilled the grand
prophecy of Copernicus, and beheld the planet Venus crescent like the
moon. It was such another moment as that when the immortal printers of
Mentz and Strasburg received the first copy of the Bible into their
hands, the work of their divine art; like that when Columbus, through
the gray dawn of the 12th of October, 1492, beheld the shores of San
Salvador; like that when the law of gravitation first revealed itself
to the intellect of Newton; like that when Franklin saw, by the
stiffening fibres of the hemp cord of his kite, that he held the
lightning in his grasp, like that when Leverrier received back from
Berlin the tidings that the predicted planet was found."

"Observe yon tree in your neighbor's garden," says Zanoni to Viola in
Bulwer's novel. "Look how it grows up, crooked and distorted. Some
wind scattered the germ, from which it sprung, in the clefts of the
rock. Choked up and walled round by crags and buildings, by nature and
man, its life has been one struggle for the light. You see how it has
writhed and twisted,--how, meeting the barrier in one spot, it has
labored and worked, stem and branch, towards the clear skies at last.
What has preserved it through each disfavor of birth and
circumstances--why are its leaves as green and fair as those of the
vine behind you, which, with all its arms, can embrace the open
sunshine? My child, because of the very instinct that impelled the
struggle,--because the labor for the light won to the light at length.
So with a gallant heart, through every adverse accident of sorrow, and
of fate, to turn to the sun, to strive for the heaven; this it is that
gives knowledge to the strong and happiness to the weak."

"Each petty hand
Can steer a ship becalmed; but he that will
Govern her and carry her to her ends, must know
His tides, his currents; how to shift his sails;
What she will bear in foul, what in fair weathers;
What her springs are, her leaks, and how to stop them;
What strands, what shelves, what rocks to threaten her;