There is much in every way, in the city of Florence, to excite the curiosity, to kindle the imagination, and to gratify the taste. Sheltered on the north by the vineclad hills of Fiesole, whose cyclopean walls carry back the antiquary to ages before the Roman, before the Etruscan power, the flowery city (Fiorenza) covers the sunny banks of the Arno with its stately palaces. Dark and frowning piles of mediaeval structure; a majestic dome, the prototype of St. Peter's; basilicas which enshrine the ashes of some of the mightiest of the dead; the stone where Dante stood to gaze on the Campanile; the house of Michael Angelo, still occupied by a descendant of his lineage and name, his hammer, his chisel, his dividers, his manuscript poems, all as if he had left them but yesterday; airy 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 canvases 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 floor of Santa Croce; no building on which I gazed with greater rev 66 erence, 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. 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." 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 the 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 Fiesolé 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. 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, "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 saw before-it has seen enough. Hang up that poor little spy-glass-it has done its work. Not Herschel 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 conquest 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 and truth, thy name shall be mentioned with honor. -EDWARD EVERETT (Adapted). "MARCHING ON A STAR" I HAPPENED some time ago to lecture to a number of army officers on "The Use of the Stars in NightMarches." They appeared to find my notes of interest and service, and this suggested to me that perhaps a small pocketbook devoted to a practical consideration of the matter might be found useful by soldiers; possibly, too, by other landsmen who are interested in the stars, or may have occasion to walk or ride by night through unfamiliar country. Furthermore, the fact that the results arrived at are obtained rather by observation and practice than by mathematical calculation should render the work well adapted to the needs and tastes of the Boy Scouts. The first question, naturally, is: "What can a landsman get by the use of the stars? To the seaman, of course, they may be of great assistance; and a good ob server under favorable conditions is able by their aid to convert his general idea of the position of his ship into one that is not more than a mile or so incorrect. But it by no means follows that the traveler by night on land will be able to, or indeed wants to, make the same use of the stars. For consider; the navigator has at his command, to assist him, chronometer, charts, sextant, nautical almanacs, and figure tables: the nightmarcher may have all these, and an artificial horizon as well, but except on a scientific expedition he is very unlikely to. Again, the former takes and works out his observations without any waste of time to the ship and with light and comfort; the latter may have to stop to do so and thus lose time, and the conditions under which he is likely to be working tend to introduce errors. Position, then, to the landsman, is (even if desirable) quite unfeasible; what the stars give him is direction. And first let us be quite clear what we mean when we speak of the stars giving direction." Not of course that they act as a kind of wayside finger-post pointing "X-12 miles," and so forth; this is more than can reasonably be expected; and if a wanderer is so completely lost that he has no notion whether his home lies north or south or east or west, all the star-lore in the world will do no more for him than enable him to choose some direction and hold to it. But this it will do. It will, in the simplest and best case, give us the N. and S. points, and we must make what use we can of that knowledge. Perhaps it has been possible to work out the bearing of destination from starting-point to be (say) N. 65 W. We lay off this angle on a piece of paper or cardboard, and pointing the one line at the ascertained N. point proceed to march along the other. |