Beating with love for man, between two thieves, Proves more than all His wounds and miracles Our Crucified to be the Son of God. Say that I long to see him; that my prayers Knock at the gates of mercy, night and day. Urge him to leave the judgment now with God And strive no more. If he be right, the stars Fight for him in their courses. Let him bow His poor, dishonoured, glorious, old grey head Before this storm, and then come home to me. O, quickly, or I fear 'twill be too late; For I am dying. Do not tell him this; But I must live to hold his hands again, And know that he is safe. I dare not leave him, helpless and half blind, Half father and half child, to rack and cord. By all the Christ within you, save him, you; And, though you may have ceased to love me now, One faithful shadow in your own last hour Shall watch beside you till all shadows die, And heaven unfold to bless you where I failed. II (_Scheiner writes to Castelli, after the Trial._) What think you of your Galileo now, Your hero that like Ajax should defy The lightning? Yesterday I saw him stand Trembling before our court of Cardinals, Trembling before the colour of their robes As sheep, before the slaughter, at the sight And smell of blood. His lips could hardly speak, And--mark you--neither rack, nor cord had touched him. Out of the Inquisition's five degrees Of rigor: first, the public threat of torture; Second, the repetition of the threat Within the torture-chamber, where we show The instruments of torture to the accused; Third, the undressing and the binding; fourth, Laying him on the rack; then, fifth and last, Torture, _territio realis_; out of these, Your Galileo reached the second only, When, clapping both his hands against his sides, He whined about a rupture that forbade These extreme courses. Great heroic soul Dropped like a cur into a sea of terror, He sank right under. Then he came up gasping, Ready to swear, deny, abjure, recant, Anything, everything! Foolish, weak, old man, Who had been so proud of his discoveries, And dared to teach his betters. How we grinned To see him kneeling there and whispering, thus, Through his white lips, bending his old grey head: _"I, Galileo Galilei, born A Florentine, now seventy years of age, Kneeling before you, having before mine eyes, And touching with my hands the Holy Gospels, Swear that I always have believed, do now, And always will believe what Holy Church Has held and preached and taught me to believe; And now, whereas I rightly am accused, Of heresy, having falsely held the sun To be the centre of our Universe, And also that this earth is not the centre, But moves; I most illogically desire Completely to expunge this dark suspicion, So reasonably conceived. I now abjure, Detest and curse these errors; and I swear That should I know another, friend or foe, Holding the selfsame heresy as myself, I will denounce him to the Inquisitor In whatsoever place I chance to be.