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."[A] 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 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 Fesolé, Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, Rivers, or mountains, in her spotty globe." 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. [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.