ement of the intellectual, nay! the
physical atmosphere. And his consciousness of unfailing unity and
order did not desert him in that larger survey, making the utmost one
could ever know of the earth seem but a very little chapter in that
endless history of God the Spirit, rejoicing so greatly in the
admirable spectacle that it never ceases to evolve from matter new
conditions. The immovable earth beneath one's feet! one almost felt
the movement, the respiration of God in it. And yet how greatly even
the physical eye, the sensible imagination (so to term it) was
flattered by the theorem. What joy in that motion, the prospect, the
music, the music of the spheres!--he could listen to it in a
perfection such as had never been conceded to Plato, to Pythagoras
even.

"Veni, Creator Spiritus,
Mentes tuorum visita,
Imple superna gratia,
Quae tu creasti pectora!"

Yes! the grand old Christian hymns, perhaps the grandest of them,
seemed to blend themselves in the chorus, to deepen immeasurably
under this new intention. It is not always, or often, that men's
abstract ideas penetrate the temperament, touch the animal spirits,
affect conduct. It was what they did with Bruno. The ghastly
spectacle of the endless material universe, infinite dust, in truth,
starry as it may look to our terrestrial eyes--that prospect from
which Pascal's faithful soul recoiled so painfully--induced in Bruno
only the delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship [241]
and sympathy, since every one of those infinite worlds must have its
sympathetic inhabitants. Scruples of conscience, if he felt such,
might well be pushed aside for the "excellency" of such knowledge as
this. To shut the eyes, whether of the body or the mind, would be a
kind of dark ingratitude; the one sin, to believe directly or
indirectly in any absolutely dead matter anywhere, because involving
denial of the indwelling spirit. A free spirit, certainly, as of
old! Through all his pantheistic flights, from horizon to horizon,
it was still the thought of liberty that presented itself to the
infinite relish of this "prodigal son" of Dominic. God the Spirit
had made all things indifferently, with a largeness, a beneficence,
impiously belied by any theory of restrictions, distinctions,
absolute limitations. Touch, see, listen, eat freely of all the
trees of the garden of Paradise with the voice of the Lord God
literally everywhere: here was the