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The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.

This race of ancient rulers still gives birth to kings Lagrange, Volta, Rasori, Canova, Rossini, Bartolini, Galvani, Vigano, Beccaria, Cicognara, Corvetto. These Italians are masters of the scientific peaks on which they stand, or of the arts to which they devote themselves.

Goethe was a master in this art of active waiting. * It was in the very year that Galvani, through his chance discovery, opened the way to the overwhelming invasion of mankind by the purely physical forces of nature, that Goethe came clearly to see that he had achieved the goal of his labours.

The driver of a tram on the San Paolo line, passing Via Galvani, saw the tumult, and amused himself by calling out to a group of women, a hundred yards beyond, that the Saint of Jenne had been discovered in Via Galvani. The rumour ran along the avenues, full of chattering groups and isolated onlookers, as fire along a trail of powder.

He conceived the idea that metallic substances might have the effect of removing diseases, if applied in a certain manner; a notion probably suggested by the then recent experiments of Galvani, in which muscular contractions were found to be produced by the contact of two metals with the living fibre.

Whereas Galvani had been rightly convinced by his earlier observations that the movement in the specimens represented a reaction to an electric stimulus from outside, he now changed his mind.

To examples like these one might add indefinitely, both from ancient and modern history, and even from our own times. Dr. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, had to battle for his wonderful international language against the same sort of ridicule, contempt, and stupid opposition which greeted Columbus, Galvani, and Stephenson.

Associates it with Italians and fluency generally, with Volta, Galvani, Marconi and so on. The proper British electricity is that high-grade useless long-sparking stuff you get by turning round a glass machine; stuff we used to call frictional electricity. Keep it in Leyden jars.... At Claverings here they still refuse to have electric bells.

Then came the discoveries of Galvani and Volta, followed by the demonstrations of Galvani's nephew Aldini, whereby dead animals were made to display the movements of life, not only by the electricity of the Voltaic pile, but, as Aldini especially showed, by a transfer of this mysterious agency from one animal to another.

I shall soon follow him; I have no more trials to pass through." Not only have women been the best companions, friends, and consolers, but they have in many cases been the most effective helpers of their husbands in their special lines of work. Galvani was especially happy in his wife.