utmost one could ever know of the earth seem but a very little
chapter in the endless history of God the Spirit, rejoicing so
greatly in the admirable spectacle that it never ceases to evolve
from matter new conditions. The immoveable earth, as we term it,
beneath one's feet!--Why, 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, in 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 [152] the grandest of
them all, seemed to lend themselves in the chorus, to be deepened
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 the mind of Pascal recoiled so painfully, induced in Bruno
only the delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship 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 sullen ingratitude;--the one sin to believe, directly or