I was his last disciple, as you say I went to him, at seventeen years of age, And offered him my hands and eyes to use, When, voicing the true mind and heart of Rome, Father Castelli, his most faithful friend, Wrote, for my master, that compassionate plea; _The noblest eye that Nature ever made Is darkened; one so exquisitely dowered, So delicate in power that it beheld More than all other eyes in ages gone And opened the eyes of all that are to come._ But, out of England, even then, there shone The first ethereal promise of light That crowns my master dead. Well I recall That day of days. There was no faintest breath Among his garden cypress-trees. They dreamed Dark, on a sky too beautiful for tears, And the first star was trembling overhead, When, quietly as a messenger from heaven, Moving unseen, through his own purer realm, Amongst the shadows of our mortal world, A young man, with a strange light on his face Knocked at the door of Galileo's house. His name was Milton. By the hand of God, He, the one living soul on earth with power To read the starry soul of this blind man, Was led through Italy to his prison door. He looked on Galileo, touched his hand ... _O, dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark .... _ In after days, He wrote it; but it pulsed within him then; And Galileo rising to his feet And turning on him those unseeing eyes That had searched heaven and seen so many worlds, Said to him, "You have found me." Often he told me in those last sad months Of how your grave young island poet brought Peace to him, with the knowledge that, far off, In other lands, the truth he had proclaimed Was gathering power. Soon after, death unlocked His prison, and the city that he loved, Florence, his town of flowers, whose gates in life He was forbid to pass, received him dead.