d 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.]

There are occasions in life in which a great mind lives years of rapt
enjoyment in a moment. I can fancy the emotions 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 (Copernicus, at the
age of eighteen, was then a student at Cracow), 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
fibers of the hempen 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.

Yes, noble Galileo, thou art right, _E pur si muove._ "It does move."
Bigots may make thee recant it; but it moves, nevertheless. Yes, the
earth moves, and the planets move, and the mighty waters move, and the
great sweeping tides of air move, and the empires of men move, and the
world of thought moves, ever onward and upward to higher facts and
bolder theories. The Inquisition may seal thy lips, but they can no more
stop the progress of the great truth propounded by Copernicus, and
demonstrated by thee, than they can stop the revolving earth.

Close now, venerable sage, that sightless, tearful eye; it has seen what
man never before saw--it has seen enough. Hang up that poor little
spy-glass--it has done its work. Not Herschell nor Rosse have,
comparatively, done more. Franciscans and Dominicans deride thy
discoveries now; but the time will come when, from two hundred
observatories in Europe and America, the glorious artillery of science
shall nightly assault the skies, but they shall gain no conquests in
those glittering fields before which thine shall be forgotten. Rest in
peace, great Columbus of the heavens--like him scorned, persecuted,
broken-hearted!--in other ages, in distant hemispheres, when the
votaries of science, with solemn acts of consecration, shall dedicate
their stately edifices to the cause of knowledge