and heat that seem her own.

Yet a nature so opulently endowed can hardly have been lacking in
purely physical ardours. His pantheistic belief that the Spirit of
God was in all things, was not inconsistent with, might encourage, a
keen and restless eye for the dramatic details of life and character
for humanity in all its visible attractiveness, since there, too, in
[238] truth, divinity lurks. From those first fair days of early
Greek speculation, love had occupied a large place in the conception
of philosophy; and in after days Bruno was fond of developing, like
Plato, like the Christian platonist, combining something of the
peculiar temper of each, the analogy between intellectual enthusiasm
and the flights of physical love, with an animation which shows
clearly enough the reality of his experience in the latter. The
Eroici Furori, his book of books, dedicated to Philip Sidney, who
would be no stranger to such thoughts, presents a singular blending
of verse and prose, after the manner of Dante's Vita Nuova. The
supervening philosophic comment re-considers those earlier physical
impulses which had prompted the sonnet in voluble Italian, entirely
to the advantage of their abstract, incorporeal equivalents. Yet if
it is after all but a prose comment, it betrays no lack of the
natural stuff out of which such mystic transferences must be made.
That there is no single name of preference, no Beatrice or Laura, by
no means proves the young man's earlier desires merely "Platonic;"
and if the colours of love inevitably lose a little of their force
and propriety by such deflection, the intellectual purpose as
certainly finds its opportunity thereby, in the matter of borrowed
fire and wings. A kind of old, scholastic pedantry creeping back
over the ardent youth who had thrown it off so defiantly (as if Love
himself went in for a degree at the University) Bruno developes,