under the mask of amorous verse, all the various stages of
abstraction, by which, as the last step of a long ladder, the mind
attains actual "union." For, as with the purely religious mystics,
union, the mystic union of souls with each other and their Lord,
nothing less than union between the contemplator and the
contemplated--the reality, or the sense, or at least the name of it--
was always at hand. Whence that instinctive tendency, if not from
the Creator of things himself, who has doubtless prompted it in the
physical universe, as in man? How familiar the thought that the
whole creation longs for God, the soul as the hart for the water-
brooks! To unite oneself to the infinite by breadth and lucidity of
intellect, to enter, by that admirable faculty, into eternal life--
this was the true vocation of the spouse, of the rightly amorous
soul--"a filosofia e necessario amore." There would be degrees of
progress therein, as of course also of relapse: joys and sorrows,
therefore. And, in interpreting these, the philosopher, whose
intellectual ardours have superseded religion and love, is still a
lover and a monk. All the influences of the convent, the heady,
sweet incense, the pleading sounds, the sophisticated light and air,
the exaggerated humour of gothic carvers, the thick stratum of pagan
sentiment beneath ("Santa Maria sopra Minerva!") are indelible in
him. Tears, sympathies, tender inspirations, attraction, repulsion,
dryness, zeal, desire, recollection: he finds a place for them all:
knows them all [239] well in their unaffected simplicity, while he
seeks the secret and secondary, or, as he fancies, the primary, form
and purport of each.

A light on actual life, or mere barren scholastic subtlety, never
before had the pantheistic doctrine been developed with such
completeness, never before connected with so large a sense of nature,