But the poor girl was herself, by this time, ill—thoroughly worn out with anxiety and terror; she lay, in fact, on what proved to be her death-bed. Her one wish was to see her dearest lord and father, so she calls him, once more. The wish was granted. His prison was changed, by orders from Rome, from Siena to Arcetri, and once more father and daughter embraced. Six days after this she died.
The broken-hearted old man now asks for permission to go to live in Florence, but is met with the stern answer that he is to stay at Arcetri, is not to go out of the house, is not to receive visitors, and that if he asks for more favours, or transgresses the commands laid upon him, he is liable to be haled back to Rome and cast into a dungeon. These harsh measures were dictated, not by cruelty, but by the fear of his still spreading heresy by conversation, and so he was to be kept isolated.
Idle, however, he was not and could not be. He often complains that his head is too busy for his body. In the enforced solitude of Arcetri he was composing those dialogues on motion which are now reckoned his greatest and most solid achievement. In these the true laws of motion are set forth for the first time (see page 167). One more astronomical discovery also he was to make—that of the moon's libration.
And then there came one more crushing blow. His eyes became inflamed and painful—the sight of one of them failed, the other soon went; he became totally blind. But this, being a heaven-sent infliction, he could bear with resignation, though it must have been keenly painful to a solitary man of his activity. "Alas!" says he, in one of his letters, "your dear friend and servant is totally blind. Henceforth this heaven, this universe, which by wonderful observations I had enlarged a hundred and a thousand times beyond the conception of former ages, is shrunk for me into the narrow space which I myself fill in it. So it pleases God; it shall therefore please me also."
He was now allowed an amanuensis, and the help of his pupils Torricelli, Castelli, and Viviani, all devotedly attached to him, and Torricelli very famous after him. Visitors also were permitted, after approval by a Jesuit supervisor; and under these circumstances many visited him, among them a man as immortal as himself—John Milton, then only twenty-nine, travelling in Italy. Surely a pathetic incident, this meeting of these two great men—the one already blind, the other destined to become so. No wonder that, as in his old age he dictated his masterpiece, the thoughts of the English poet should run on the blind sage of Tuscany, and the reminiscence of their conversation should lend colour to the poem.
Well, it were tedious to follow the petty annoyances and troubles to which Galileo was still subject—how his own son was set to see that no unauthorized procedure took place, and that no heretic visitors were admitted; how it was impossible to get his new book printed till long afterwards; and how one form of illness after another took possession of him. The merciful end came at last, and at the age of seventy-eight he was released from the Inquisition.
They wanted to deny him burial—they did deny him a monument; they threatened to cart his bones away from Florence if his friends attempted one. And so they hoped that he and his work might be forgotten.
Poor schemers! Before the year was out an infant was born in Lincolnshire, whose destiny it was to round and complete and carry forward the work of their victim, so that, until man shall cease from the planet, neither the work nor its author shall have need of a monument.