impassioned, an Italian of the Italians, it awoke a constant,
inextinguishable appetite for every form of experience,--a fear, as
of the one sin possible, of limiting, for one's self or another, the
great stream flowing for thirsty souls, that wide pasture set ready
for the hungry heart.

Considered from the point of view of a minute observation of nature,
the Infinite might figure as "the infinitely little"; no blade of
grass being like another, as there was no limit to the complexities
of an atom of earth,--cell, sphere, within sphere. And the earth
itself, hitherto seemingly the privileged centre of a very limited
universe, was, after all, but an atom in an infinite world of starry
space, then lately divined by candid intelligence, which the
telescope was one day to present to bodily eyes. For if Bruno must
needs look forward to the future, to Bacon, for adequate knowledge of
the earth, the infinitely little, he could look backwards also
gratefully to another daring mind which had already put that earth
into its modest place, and opened the full view of the heavens. If
God is eternal, then, the universe is infinite and worlds
innumerable. Yes! one might well have divined what reason now
demonstrated, indicating those endless [151] spaces which a real
sidereal science would gradually occupy.

That the stars are suns: that the earth is in motion: that the earth
is of like stuff with the stars:--now the familiar knowledge of
children--dawning on Bruno as calm assurance of reason on appeal from
the prejudice of the eye, brought to him an inexpressibly
exhilarating sense of enlargement in the intellectual, nay! the
physical atmosphere. And his consciousness of unfailing unity and
order did not desert him in that broader survey, which made the