silence and self-concentration. The prospect of such freedom
sufficiently explains why a young man who, however well-found in
worldly and personal advantages, was above all conscious of great
intellectual possessions, and of fastidious spirit also, with a
remarkable distaste for the vulgar, should have espoused poverty,
chastity, and obedience, in a Dominican cloister. What liberty of
mind may really come to, in such places, what daring new departures
it may suggest even to the strictly monastic temper, is exemplified
by the dubious and dangerous mysticism of men like John of Parma and
[140] Joachim of Flora, the reputed author of a new "Everlasting
Gospel"; strange dreamers, in a world of sanctified rhetoric, of that
later dispensation of the Spirit, in which all law will have passed
away; or again by a recognised tendency, in the great rival Order of
Saint Francis, in the so-called "spiritual" Franciscans, to
understand the dogmatic words of faith, with a difference.

The three convents in which successively Bruno had lived, at Naples,
at Citta di Campagna, and finally the Minerva at Rome, developed
freely, we may suppose, all the mystic qualities of a genius, in
which, from the first, a heady southern imagination took the lead.
But it was from beyond monastic bounds that he would look for the
sustenance, the fuel, of an ardour born or bred within them. Amid
such artificial religious stillness the air itself becomes generous
in undertones. The vain young monk (vain, of course) would feed his
vanity by puzzling the good, sleepy heads of the average sons of
Dominic with his neology, putting new wine into old bottles, teaching
them their own business, the new, higher, truer sense of the most
familiar terms, of the chapters they read, the hymns they sang; above
all, as it happened, every word that referred to the Spirit, the
reign of the Spirit, and its excellent freedom. He would soon pass