in re venered_); it is
to be understood figuratively as indicating the height of the
masculine forces.

When his power became assured, he proved himself a liberal and
enlightened patron of the arts and industries. The poetry and music
of his native land attracted him the more as he felt within himself
the moving god, firing his imagination with poetic vision, the _Deus
in nobis, calescimus, agitant'illo_. Not only did he diligently seek
out and royally entertain skilled bards, but he himself had the
credit of composing sixty chants, and it appears that after the
Conquest there were that many written down in Roman characters and
attributed to him. We need not inquire too closely whether they were
strictly his own composition. Perhaps they were framed on themes
which he furnished, or were selected by him from those sung at his
court by various bards. The history of the works by royal authors
everywhere must not be too minutely scanned if we wish to leave them
their reputation for originality.

He was of a philosophic as well as a poetic temperament, and
reflected deeply on the problems of life and nature. Following the
inherent tendency of the enlightened intellect to seek unity in
diversity, the One in the Many, he reached the conclusion to which so
many thinkers in all ages and of all races have been driven, that
underlying all phenomena is one primal and adequate Cause, the
Essence of all Existence. This conclusion he expressed in a
philosophic apothegm which was preserved by his disciples, in these
words:--

_Ipan in chicunauitlamanpan meztica in tloque nahuaque palne nohuani
teyocoyani icel teotl oquiyocox in ixquex quexquex in ittoni ihuan
amo ittoni._

"In the ninth series is the Cause of All, of us and of all created
things, the one only God who created all things both visible and
invisible."[50]

To perpetuate the memory of this philosophic deduction he caused to
be constructed at Tezcuco a stone tower nine stories in height, the
ruins of which were visible long after the Spanish occupation. To
this tower he gave the name Chililitli, a term of uncertain meaning,
but which we find was applied in Tenochtitlan to a building sacred to
the Nine Winds.[51] To explain the introduction of this number, I
should add that a certain school of Nahuatl priests taught that the
heaven above and the earth below were each divided into nine
concentric arcs, each leading farther and farther away from the
conditions of the p