"At evening, from the top of Fesolé,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,
Rivers, or mountains, in her spotty globe."

that poor little spy-glass (for it is scarcely more) through which
the human eye first distinctly beheld the surface of the moon--first
discovered the phases of Venus, the satellites of Jupiter, and the
seeming handles of Saturn--first penetrated the dusky depths of the
heavens--first pierced the clouds of visual error, which, from the
creation of the world, involved the system of the Universe.

[Footnote A: Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 213.]

There are occasions in life in which a great mind lives years of rapt
enjoyment in a moment. I can fancy the emotions of Galileo, when, first
raising the newly-constructed telescope to the heavens, he saw fulfilled
the grand prophecy of Copernicus, and beheld the planet Venus crescent
like the moon. It was such another moment as that when the immortal
printers of Mentz and Strasburg received the first copy of the Bible
into their hands, the work of their divine art; like that when Columbus,
through the gray dawn of the 12th of October, 1492 (Copernicus, at the
age of eighteen, was then a student at Cracow), beheld the shores of San
Salvador; like that when the law of gravitation first revealed itself to
the intellect of Newton; like that when Franklin saw by the stiffening
fibers of the hempen cord of his kite, that he held the lightning in his
grasp; like that when Leverrier received back from Berlin the tidings
that the predicted planet was found.

Yes, noble Galileo, thou art right, _E pur si muove._ "It does move."