Letters written by Tycho about this time are full of foreboding. He greatly dreads having to leave Uraniburg, with which his whole life has for twenty years been bound up. He tries to comfort himself with the thought that, wherever he is sent, he will have the same heavens and the same stars over his head.
Gradually his Norwegian estate and his pension were taken away, and in five years poverty compelled him to abandon his magnificent temple, and to take a small house in Copenhagen.
Not content with this, Walchendorf got a Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the value of his astronomical labours. This sapient body reported that his work was not only useless, but noxious; and soon after he was attacked by the populace in the public street.
Nothing was left for him now but to leave the country, and he went into Germany, leaving his wife and instruments to follow him whenever he could find a home for them.
His wanderings in this dark time—some two years—are not quite clear; but at last the enlightened Emperor of Bohemia, Rudolph II., invited him to settle in Prague. Thither he repaired, a castle was given him as an observatory, a house in the city, and 3000 crowns a year for life. So his instruments were set up once more, students flocked to hear him and to receive work at his hands—among them a poor youth, John Kepler, to whom he was very kind, and who became, as you know, a still greater man than his master.
But the spirit of Tycho was broken, and though some good work was done at Prague—more observations made, and the Rudolphine tables begun—yet the hand of death was upon him. A painful disease seized him, attended with sleeplessness and temporary delirium, during the paroxysms of which he frequently exclaimed, Ne frustra vixisse videar. ("Oh that it may not appear that I have lived in vain!")
Quietly, however, at last, and surrounded by his friends and relatives, this fierce, passionate soul passed away, on the 24th of October, 1601.
His beloved instruments, which were almost a part of himself, were stored by Rudolph in a museum with scrupulous care, until the taking of Prague by the Elector Palatine's troops. In this disturbed time they got smashed, dispersed, and converted to other purposes. One thing only was saved—the great brass globe, which some thirty years after was recognized by a later king of Denmark as having belonged to Tycho, and deposited in the Library of the Academy of Sciences at Copenhagen, where I believe it is to this day.
The island of Huen was overrun by the Danish nobility, and nothing now remains of Uraniburg but a mound of earth and two pits.
As to the real work of Tycho, that has become immortal enough,—chiefly through the labours of his friend and scholar whose life we shall consider in the next lecture.