influences to play upon men as he had been played upon. A challenge,
a war-cry, an [154] alarum, everywhere he seemed to be but the
instrument of some subtly materialised spiritual force, like that of
the old Greek prophets, that "enthusiasm" he was inclined to set so
high, or like impulsive Pentecostal fire. His hunger to know, fed
dreamily enough at first within the convent walls, as he wandered
over space and time, an indefatigable reader of books, would be fed
physically now by ear and eye, by large matter-of-fact experience, as
he journeys from university to university; less as a teacher than a
courtier, a citizen of the world, a knight-errant of intellectual
light. The philosophic need to try all things had given reasonable
justification to the stirring desire for travel common to youth, in
which, if in nothing else, that whole age of the later Renaissance
was invincibly young. The theoretic recognition of that mobile
spirit of the world, ever renewing its youth, became the motive of a
life as mobile, as ardent, as itself, of a continual journey, the
venture and stimulus of which would be the occasion of ever-new
discoveries, of renewed conviction.

The unity, the spiritual unity, of the world:--that must involve the
alliance, the congruity, of all things with one another, of the
teacher's personality with the doctrine he had to deliver, of the
spirit of that doctrine with the fashion of his utterance, great
reinforcements of sympathy. In his own case, certainly, when Bruno
confronted his audience at Paris, himself, his theme, [155] his
language, were alike the fuel of one clear spiritual flame, which
soon had hold of his audience also; alien, strangely alien, as that
audience might seem from the speaker. It was intimate discourse, in
magnetic touch with every one present, with his special point of
impressibility; the sort of speech which, consolidated into literary