What a sad tragedy do these words, in a letter to
Maestlin, reveal:--"I stand whole days in the antechamber, and am nought
for study." And then he adds the sublime compensation: "I keep up my
spirits, however, with the thought that I serve, not the Emperor alone,
but the whole human race,--that I am laboring not merely for the
present generation, but for posterity. If God stand by me and look to
the victuals, I hope to perform something yet." Eternal type of the
consolation which the consciousness of truth brings with it, his
ejaculation on the discovery of his third law remains one of the
sublimest utterances of the human mind:--"The die is cast; the book is
written,--to be read now or by posterity, I care not which: it may well
wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for
an observer!" Cast in a stormy and chaotic age, he was persecuted by
both Protestants and Catholics on account of the purity and elevation
of his religious ideas; and from the disclosures of Baron von
Breitschwert [1] it seems, that, in the midst of his sublimest labors,
he spent five years in the defence of his poor old mother against a
charge of witchcraft.
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