itica_.]

Faith and poetry are the highest regions in which his spirit can
profitably move. The study of government, law, and social ethics, the
analysis of physical conditions to which he is subject, and over which
he has an undefined, though limited, control, form the practical sphere
of his intelligence. Bruno traversed these regions; and, forasmuch as
the outcome of his exploration was no system, but a congeries of poetic
visions, shrewd guesses, profound intuitions, and passionate
enthusiasms, bound together and sustained by a burning sense of the
Divine unity in nature and in man, we may be permitted to regard him as
more fortunate than those cloud-castle-builders whose classifications of
absolute existences are successively proved by the advance of relative
knowledge to be but catalogues of some few objects apprehended by the
vision of each partially-instructed age. We have, indeed, reason to
marvel how many of Bruno's intuitions have formed the stuff of later,
more elaborated systems, and still remain the best which these contain.
We have reason to wonder how many of his divinations have worked
themselves into the common fund of modern beliefs, and have become
philosophical truisms.

It is probable that if Bruno's career had not been cut short by the
dungeon and the stake at the early age of thirty-four, he might have
produced some final work in which his theories would have assumed a
formal shape. It is possible that the Vatican even now contains the
first sketch for such a studied exposition in the treatise on the Seven
Arts, which Giovanni Mocenigo handed over to the Inquisition, and which
the philosopher intended to dedicate to Clement VIII. But the loss of
this elaborated system is hardly to be regretted, except for the clearer
light it must have thrown upon the workings of the most illuminated
intellect in the sixteenth century. We know that it could not have
revealed to us the secret of things.

Bruno cast his thoughts in two molds: the dialogue, and Latin
hexameters. He was attracted to the latter by his early study of
Parmenides and Lucretius. The former seems to have been natural to the
man. We must not forget that he was a Neapolitan, accustomed from
childhood to the farces of his native land, vividly alive to the comic
aspects of existence, and joyously appreciative of reality. His first
known composition was a comedy, _Il Candelajo_; and something of the
drama can be traced in all those Italian c