But there's this other charge against my friend,
And master, Galileo. It is brought
By friends, made sharper by their pity and grief,
The charge that he refused his martyrdom
And so denied his own high faith.
Whose faith,--
His friends', his Protestant followers', or his own?
Faced by the torture, that sublime old man
Was still a faithful Catholic, and his thought
Plunged deeper than his Protestant followers knew.
His aim was not to strike a blow at Rome
But to confound his enemies. He believed
As humbly as Castelli or Celeste
That there is nothing absolute but that Power
With which his Church confronted him. To this
He bowed his head, acknowledging that his light
Was darkness; but affirming, all the more,
That Ptolemy's light was even darker yet.
Read your own Protestant Milton, who derived
His mighty argument from my master's lips:
_"Whether the sun predominant in heaven
Rise on the earth, or earth rise on the sun;
Leave them to God above; Him serve and fear."_
Just as in boyhood, when my master watched
The swinging lamp in the cathedral there
At Pisa; and, by one finger on his pulse,
Found that, although the great bronze miracle swung
Through ever-shortening spaces, yet it moved
More slowly, and so still swung in equal times;
He straight devised another boon to man,
Those pulse-clocks which by many a fevered bed
Our doctors use; dreamed of that timepiece, too,
Whose punctual swinging pendulum on earth
Measures the starry periods, and to-day
Talks peacefully to children by the fire
Like an old grandad full of ancient tales,
Remembering endless ages, and foretelling
Eternities to come; but, all the while
There, in the dim cathedral, he knew well,
That dreaming youngster, with his tawny mane
Of red-gold hair, and deep ethereal eyes,
What odorous clouds of incense round him rose;
Was conscious in the dimness, of great throngs
Kneeling around him; shared in his own heart
The music and the silence and the cry,
_O, salutaris hostia!_--so now,
There was no mortal conflict in his mind
Between his dream-clocks and things absolute,
And one far voice, most absolute of all,
Feeble with suffering, calling night and day
"_Return, return_;" the voice of his Celeste.
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