Himself, who has doubtless prompted it in the physical universe, as
in man? How familiar the thought that the whole creation, not less
than the soul of man, longs for God, "as the hart for the water-
brooks"! To unite oneself to the infinite by largeness and lucidity
of intellect, to enter, by that admirable faculty, into eternal life-
-this was the true vocation of the spouse, of the rightly amorous
soul. A filosofia e necessario amore. There would be degrees of
progress therein, as of course also of relapse: joys and sorrows,
therefore. And, in interpreting these, the philosopher, whose
intellectual ardours have superseded religion and physical love, is
still a lover and a monk. All the influences of the convent, the
sweet, heady [148] incense, the pleading sounds, the sophisticated
light and air, the grotesque humours of old gothic carvers, the thick
stratum of pagan sentiment beneath all this,--Santa Maria sopra
Minervam!--are indelible in him. Tears, sympathies, tender
inspirations, attraction, repulsion, zeal, dryness, recollection,
desire:--he finds a place for them all: knows them all well in their
unaffected simplicity, while he seeks the secret and secondary, or,
as he fancies, the primary, form and purport of each.

Whether as a light on actual life, or as a 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 now
with equal liveliness on the natural world, in that region of his
birth, where all the colour and force of nature are at least two-
fold. Nature is not only a thought or meditation 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