In less than a year, sweet Maria Celeste had said the last psalms for
him. She died April 1, 1634, at thirty-three years of age, leaving
Galileo heart-broken; "a woman," he said, "of exquisite mind, singular
goodness, and most tenderly attached to me."
He went to work on another book, but he said, pathetically, "I hear her
constantly calling me!" Beautiful spirit, that will forever shed a halo
around the name of Galileo Galilei!
In the summer of 1636, he completed his "Dialogues on Motion," and sent
it to Leyden for publication. The next year he made his last discovery,
known as the moon's librations.
The house at Arcetri had become dark and lonely. The wife of
Michelangelo, her three daughters and a son, had all died of the plague.
It was doubly dark, for Galileo had become hopelessly blind, "so that
this heaven, this earth, this universe, which I by my marvellous
discoveries and clear demonstrations had enlarged a hundred thousand
times beyond the belief of the wise men of bygone ages, henceforward for
me is shrunk into such a small space as is filled by my own bodily
sensations."
His last work was a short treatise on the secondary light of the moon.
"I am obliged now," he said, sadly, "to have recourse to other hands and
other pens than mine since my sad loss of sight. This, of course,
occasions great loss of time, particularly now that my memory is
impaired by advanced age; so that in placing my thoughts on paper, many
and many a time I am forced to have the foregoing sentences read to me
before I can tell what ought to follow; else I should repeat the same
thing over and over."
He had planned other work, but death came on the evening of January 8,
1642, eight years after Celeste left him. His beloved pupils, Torricelli
and Viviani, and his son Vincenzo, stood by his bedside.
He desired to be buried in the family vault of the Galilei in Santa
Croce, at Florence, and the city at once voted a public funeral and
three thousand crowns for a marble mausoleum. But the church at Rome
prevented, lest the pernicious doctrine that the earth moves, should
thereby have confirmation. He was therefore buried in an obscure corner
of Del Noviziato, a side chapel of Santa Croce.
A century later, March 12, 1737, in the presence of the learned men of
Italy, with great ceremony, the bones of Galileo were removed to a new
resting-place in Santa Croce, and buried with his beloved friend,
Viviani. An imposing monument was erected over him. The truth finally
triumphed, as it always does. The works of Galileo, in sixteen volumes,
are no longer prohibited, as they were in his lifetime.
SIR ISAAC NEWTON.
[Illustration: SIR ISAAC NEWTON.]
In the same year, 1642, in which Galileo, sad and blind, went away from
the earth, Sir Isaac Newton came to make his home upon it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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