. . . exploring with his staff, His eyes upturned as to the golden sun, His eyeballs idly rolling."This may have been the punishment of his recantation,--not Inquisitorial torture, but the consciousness that he had lost his honor. Poor Galileo! thine illustrious visitor, when his affliction came, could cast his sightless eyeballs inward, and see and tell "things attempted yet in prose or rhyme,"--not "Rocks, caves, lakes, bogs, fens, and shades of death,Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire,"but of "eternal Providence," and "Eden with surpassing glory crowned," and "our first parents," and of "salvation," "goodness infinite," of "wisdom," which when known we need no higher though all the stars we know by name,--"All secrets of the deep, all Nature's works, Or works of God in heaven, or air, or sea."And yet, thou stricken observer of the heavenly bodies! hadst thou but known what marvels would be revealed by the power of thy wondrous instrument after thou should'st be laid lifeless and cold beneath the marble floor of Sante Croce, at the age of seventy-eight, without a monument (although blessed on his death-bed by Pope Urban), having died a prisoner of the Inquisition, yet not without having rendered to astronomical science services of utmost value,--even thou might have died rejoicing, as one of the great benefactors of the world. And thy discoveries shall be forever held in gratitude; they shall herald others of even greater importance. Newton shall prove that the different planets are attracted to the sun in the inverse ratio of the squares of their distances; that the earth has a force on the moon identical with the force of gravity, and that all celestial bodies, to the utmost boundaries of space, mutually attract each other; that all particles of matter are governed by the same law,--the great law of gravitation, by which "astronomy," in the language of Whewell, "passed from boyhood to manhood, and by which law the great discoverer added more to the realm of science than any man before or since his day." And after Newton shall pass away, honored and lamented, and be buried with almost royal pomp in the vaults of Westminster, Halley and other mathematicians shall construct lunar tables, by which longitude shall be accurately measured on the pathless ocean. Lagrange and Laplace shall apply the Newtonian theory to determine the secular inequalities of celestial motion;they shall weigh absolutely the amount of matter in the planets;they shall show how far their orbits deviate from circles; and they shall enumerate the cycles of changes detected in the circuit of the moon. Clairaut shall remove the perplexity occasioned by the seeming discrepancy between the observed and computed motions of the moon's perigee. Halley shall demonstrate the importance of observations of the transit of Venus as the only certain way of obtaining the sun's parallax, and hence the distance of the sun from the earth; he shall predict the return of that mysterious body which we call a comet. Herschel shall construct a telescope which magnifies two thousand times, and add another planet to our system beyond the mighty orb of Saturn. Romer shall estimate the velocity of light from the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites. Bessell shall pass the impassable gulf of space and measure the distance of some of the fixed stars, although such is the immeasurable space between the earth and those distant suns that the parallax of only about thirty has yet been discovered with our finest instruments,--so boundless is the material universe, so vast are the distances, that light, travelling one hundred and sixty thousand miles with every pulsation of the blood, will not reach us from some of those remote worlds in one hundred thousand years. So marvellous shall be the victories of science, that the perturbations of the planets in their courses shall reveal the existence of a new one more distant than Uranus, and Leverrier shall tell at what part of the heavens that star shall first be seen.
So far as we have discovered, the universe which we have observed with telescopic instruments has no limits that mortals can define, and in comparison with its magnitude our earth is less than a grain of sand, and is so old that no genius can calculate and no imagination can conceive when it had a beginning. All that we know is, that suns exist at distances we cannot define. But around what centre do they revolve? Of what are they composed? Are they inhabited by intelligent and immortal beings? Do we know that they are not eternal, except from the divine declaration that there WAS a time when the Almighty fiat went forth for this grand creation?
Creation involves a creator; and can the order and harmony seen in Nature's laws exist without Supreme intelligence and power? Who, then, and what, is God? "Canst thou by searching find out Him?
Knowest thou the ordinances of Heaven? Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?" What an atom is this world in the light of science! Yet what dignity has man by the light of revelation! What majesty and power and glory has God! What goodness, benevolence, and love, that even a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice,--that we are the special objects of His providence and care! Is there an imagination so lofty that will not be oppressed with the discoveries that even the telescope has made?
Ah, to what exalted heights reason may soar when allied with faith!
How truly it should elevate us above the evils of this brief and busy existence to the conditions of that other life,--"When the soul, Advancing ever to the Source of light And all perfection, lives, adores, and reigns In cloudless knowledge, purity, and bliss!"AUTHORITIES.
Delambre, Histoire de l'Astronomie; Arago, Histoire de l'Astronomie; Life of Galileo, in Cabinet Library; Life of Galileo, by Brewster; Lives of Galileo, by Italian and Spanish Literary Men;Whewell's History of Inductive Sciences; Plurality of Worlds;Humboldt's Cosmos; Nichols' Architecture of the Heavens; Chalmers'
Astronomical Discourses; Life of Kepler, Library of Useful Knowledge; Brewster's Life of Tycho Brahe, of Kepler, and of Sir Isaac Newton; Mitchell's Stellar and Planetary Worlds; Bradley's Correspondence; Airy's Reports; Voiron's History of Astronomy;Philosophical Transactions; Everett's Oration on Galileo; Life of Copernicus; Bayly's Astronomy; Encyclopaedia Britannica, Art.
Astronomy; Proctor's Lectures.
End
