nd sorrows,
therefore. And, in interpreting these, the philosopher, whose
intellectual ardours have superseded religion and love, is still a
lover and a monk. All the influences of the convent, the heady,
sweet incense, the pleading sounds, the sophisticated light and air,
the exaggerated humour of gothic carvers, the thick stratum of pagan
sentiment beneath ("Santa Maria sopra Minerva!") are indelible in
him. Tears, sympathies, tender inspirations, attraction, repulsion,
dryness, zeal, desire, recollection: he finds a place for them all:
knows them all [239] well in their unaffected simplicity, while he
seeks the secret and secondary, or, as he fancies, the primary, form
and purport of each.

A light on actual life, or mere barren scholastic subtlety, never
before had the pantheistic doctrine been developed with such
completeness, never before connected with so large a sense of nature,
so large a promise of the knowledge of it as it really is. The eyes
that had not been wanting to visible humanity turned with equal
liveliness on the natural world in that region of his birth, where
all its force and colour is twofold. Nature is not only a thought in
the divine mind; it is also the perpetual energy of that mind, which,
ever identical with itself, puts forth and absorbs in turn all the
successive forms of life, of thought, of language even. But what
seemed like striking transformations of matter were in truth only a
chapter, a clause, in the great volume of the transformations of the
Spirit. To that mystic recognition that all is divine had succeeded
a realisation of the largeness of the field of concrete knowledge,
the infinite extent of all there was actually to know. Winged,
fortified, by this central philosophic faith, the student proceeds to
the reading of nature, led on from point to point by manifold lights,
which will surely strike on him, by the way, from the intelligence in
it, speaking directly, sympathetically, to the intelligence in him.
The earth's wonderful animation, as divined by one who anticipates by
a whole generation the "philosophy of experience:" in that, the bold,
flighty, pantheistic speculation became tangible matter of fact.
Here was the needful book for man to read, the full revelation,
the detailed story of that one universal mind, struggling, emerging,
through shadow, substance, manifest spirit, in various orders of
being--the veritable history of God. And nature, together with the