family, and was beginning to enjoy that domestic happiness and studious quiet so congenial to his wishes, when persecution on account of his religion compelled him to leave Gratz, to which, however, he was afterwards recalled by the states of Styria. Meanwhile Tycho Brahé, who had come to Germany, and was comfortably settled under the munificent patronage of Rodolphus, fixed upon Kepler as a suitable assistant, and soon induced him, by urgent letters and flattering promises, to accept of the situation. Compelled in a great measure by the unsettled state of affairs in Austria, Kepler speedily repaired to Prague, and applied himself, in conjunction with Tycho, to the completion of the Rodolphine Tables, which were first published at Ulm in 1626. At Tycho's recommendation, he was established at that place; but as his office and science did not afford him a subsistence, he studied medicine, in order to gain a livelihood by its practice. The emperor had assigned him a salary, but in the period of trouble which preceded the Thirty Years' War, it was not paid. Even when he was appointed imperial mathematician by Matthias, Rodolphus' successor, his hopes of recovering his arrears were disappointed. Fresh controversies with the clergy, and the disturbed state of the country, made his situation very uncomfortable: he therefore left Lintz, repaired to Ratisbon, declined an invitation to England, was confirmed by the succeeding emperor, Ferdinand, in the office of imperial methematician, and afterwards went to Ulm to superintend the printing of the Rodolphine Tables. In 1627 he returned to Prague, and received from the emperor six thousand guilders. He finally became a professor at Rostock, on the recommendation of Albert, duke of Wallenstein, but did not receive the promised compensation. In 1630 he went, by permission of the emperor, to Ratisbon, to claim payment of the arrears of his pension; but he was there seized with a violent fever, supposed to have been brought upon him by too hard riding; and to this he fell a victim in the month of November, in the fifty-ninth year of his age. In 1808, a monument, consisting of a Doric temple enshrining his bust, was erected to his memory in Ratisbon by Charles Theodore Von Dalberg.
Kepler is represented by his biographers as a man of small stature, thin, of a weak constitution, and defective sight; but of somewhat gay and sportive manners. He was attached to his science with the most fervent enthusiasm; he sought after truth with eagerness, but forgot, in the search, the maxims of worldly prudence. To him were allotted but a scanty share of what are commonly esteemed the pleasures of life; but he endured all calamities with firmness, being consoled by the higher enjoyments which science never fails to impart to her true and cordial votaries. 'As an astronomer,' says Lalande, 'he is as famous in astronomy for the sagacious application which he made of Tycho's numerous observations (for he was not himself an observer), as the Danish philosopher for the collection of such vast materials.' To him, says another authority, the world is indebted for the discovery of the true figure of the planetary orbits, and the proportions of the motions of the solar system. Like the disciples of Pythagoras and Plato, Kepler was seized with a peculiar passion for finding analogies and harmonies in nature; and though this led him to the adoption of strange and ridiculous conceits, we shall readily be disposed to overlook these, when we reflect they were the means of leading him to the most important discoveries. He was the first who
