The three convents in which Bruno lived successively, 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 conventional bounds 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, 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, its excellent freedom. He would soon pass beyond the utmost
limits of his brethren's sympathy, beyond the largest and freest
interpretation those words would bear, to thoughts and words on an
altogether different plane, of which the full scope was only to be
felt in certain old pagan writers, though approached, perhaps, at
first, as having a kind of natural, preparatory kinship with
Scripture itself. The Dominicans would seem to have had well-
stocked, liberally-selected, libraries; and this curious youth, in
that age of restored letters, read eagerly, easily, and very soon
came to the kernel of a difficult old author--Plotinus or Plato; to
the purpose of thinkers older still, surviving by glimpses only in
the books of others--Empedocles, Pythagoras, who had enjoyed the
original divine sense of things, above all, Parmenides, that most
ancient assertor of God's identity with the world. The affinities,
the unity, of the visible and the invisible, of earth and heaven, of
all things whatever, with each other, through the consciousness, the
person, of God the Spirit, who was at every moment of infinite time,