final counsel of perfection. The
world was even larger than youthful appetite, youthful capacity. Let
theologian and every other theorist beware how he narrowed either.
The plurality of worlds! how petty in comparison seemed the sins, to
purge which was the chief motive for coming to places like this
convent, whence Bruno, with vows broken, or obsolete for him,
presently departed. A sonnet, expressive of the joy with which he
returned to so much more than the liberty of ordinary men, does not
suggest that he was driven from it. Though he must have seemed to
those who surely had loved so lovable a creature there to be
departing, like the prodigal of the Gospel, into the furthest of
possible far countries, there is no proof of harsh treatment, or even
of an effort to detain him.

It happens, of course most naturally, that those who undergo the
shock of spiritual or intellectual change sometimes fail to recognise
their debt to the deserted cause: how much of the heroism, or other
high quality, of their rejection has really been the growth of what
they reject? Bruno, the escaped monk, is still a monk: his
philosophy, impious as it might seem to some, a new religion. He
came forth well fitted by conventual influences to play upon men as
he was played upon. A challenge, a war-cry, an alarum; everywhere he
seemed to be the creature of some subtly materialized spiritual
force, like that of the old Greek prophets, like the primitive
"enthusiasm" he was inclined to set so high, or impulsive Pentecostal
fire. His hunger to know, fed at first dreamily enough within the
convent walls as he wandered over space and time an indefatigable
reader of books, would be fed physically now by ear and eye, by large
matter-of-fact experience, as he journeys from university to
university; yet still, less as a teacher than a courtier, a citizen
of the world, a knight-errant of intellectual light. The philosophic
need to try all things had given reasonable justification to the
stirring desire for travel common to youth, in which, if in nothing
else, that whole age of the [242] later Renaissance was invincibly
young. The theoretic recognition of that mobile spirit of the world,
ever renewing its youth, became, sympathetically, the motive of a
life as mobile, as ardent, as itself; of a continual journey, the
venture and stimulus of which would be the occasion of ever new
discoveries, of renewed conviction.

The unity, the spiritual unity