s over, and long before
Savonarola's famous "bonfire of vanities," he had destroyed those
love-songs in the vulgar tongue, which would have been such a relief to
us, after the scholastic prolixity of his Latin writings. It was in
another spirit that he composed a Platonic commentary, the only work of
his in Italian which has come down to us, on the "Song of Divine
Love"--secondo la mente ed opinione dei Platonici--"according to the
mind and opinion of the Platonists," by his friend Hieronymo Beniveni,
in which, with an ambitious array of every sort of learning, and a
profusion of imagery borrowed indifferently from the astrologers, the
Cabala, and Homer, and Scripture, and Dionysius the Areopagite, he
attempts to define the stages by which the soul passes from the earthly
to the unseen beauty. A change indeed had passed over him, as if the
chilling touch of the abstract and disembodied beauty Platonists profess
to long for was already upon him; and perhaps it was a sense of this,
coupled with that over-brightness which in the popular imagination
always betokens an early death, that made Camilla Rucellai, one of those
prophetic women whom the preaching of Savonarola had raised up in
Florence, declare, seeing him for the first time, that he would depart
in the time of lilies--prematurely, that is, like the field-flowers
which are withered by the scorching sun almost as soon as they are
sprung up. It was now that he wrote down those thoughts on the religious
life which Sir Thomas More turned into English, and which another
English translator thought worthy to be added to the books of the
Imitation. "It is not hard to know God, provided one will not force
oneself to define Him":--has been thought a great saying of Joubert's.
"Love God," Pico writes to Angelo Politian, "we rather may, than either
know Him, or by speech utter Him. And yet had men liefer by knowledge
never find that which they seek, than by love possess that thing, which
also without love were in vain found."

Yet he who had this fine touch for spiritual things did not--and in this
is the enduring interest of his story--even after his conversion, forget
the old gods. He is one of the last who seriously and sincerely
entertained the claims on men's faith of the pagan religions; he is
anxious to ascertain the true significance of the obscurest legend, the
lightest tradition concerning them. With many thoughts and many
influences which led him in that direction,