and, to touch the strings of the lute, without raising his
eyes from the ground.' This would make a picture: spring twilight in
the quaint Italian room, with perhaps a branch of fig-tree or of bay
across the open window; the mother looking up with anxious face from her
needlework; the youth, with those terrible eyes and tense lips and
dilated nostrils of the future prophet, not yet worn by years of care,
but strongly marked and unmistakable, bending over the melancholy chords
of the lute, dressed almost for the last time in secular attire.

[1] Often in later life Savonarola cried that he had sought the
cloister to find rest, but that God had chosen, instead of
bringing him into calm waters, to cast him on a tempest-swollen
sea. See the Sermon quoted by Villari, vol. i. p. 298.

On the very next day Girolamo left Ferrara in secret and journeyed to
Bologna. There he entered the order of S. Dominic, the order of the
Preachers, the order of his master S. Thomas, the order too, let us
remember, of inquisitorial crusades. The letter written to his father
after taking this step is memorable. In it he says: 'The motives by
which I have been led to enter into a religious life are these: the
great misery of the world; the iniquities of men, their rapes,
adulteries, robberies, their pride, idolatry, and fearful blasphemies:
so that things have come to such a pass that no one can be found acting
righteously. Many times a day have I repeated with tears the verse:

Heu, fuge crudeles terras, fuge littus avarum!

I could not endure the enormous wickedness of the blinded people of
Italy; and the more so because I saw everywhere virtue despised and vice
honored.' We see clearly that Savonarola's vocation took its origin in a
deep sense of the wickedness of the world. It was the same spirit as
that which drove the early Christians of Alexandria into the Thebaid.
Austere and haggard, consumed with the zeal of the Lord, he had moved
long enough among the Ferrarese holiday-makers. Those elegant young men
in tight hose and particolored jackets, with oaths upon their lips and
deeds of violence and lust within their hearts, were no associates for
him. It is touching, however, to note that no text of Ezekiel or
Jeremiah, but Virgil's musical hexameter, sounded through his soul the
warning to depart.

In this year Savonarola composed another poem, this time on the Ruin of
the Church. In his boyhood he had witnessed the pom