gazed upon the sun barely one luster and one year; but so far as language goes, I know not how to judge whether she springs from Italy or France or England!  From her hand, touching the instruments of music, no man could reckon if she be of corporate or incorporeal substance.  Her perfected goodness makes one marvel whether she be flown from heaven, or be a creature of this common earth.  It is at least evident to every man that for the shaping of so fair a body the blood of both her parents has contributed, while for the tissue of her rare spirit the virtues of their heroic souls have been combined.’[97]

[Footnote 96:  Op.  It. vol. i. p. 267.]

[Footnote 97:  Loc. cit. p. 267.]

It was time to leave these excellent and hospitable friends.  ’Forth from the tranquil to the trembling air’ Bruno’s unquiet impulse drove him.  He returned to Paris at the end of 1585, disputed before the Sorbonne with some success of scandal, and then, disquieted by the disorders of the realm, set out for Germany.  We find him at Marburg in the following year, ill-received by the University, but welcomed by the Prince.  Thence we follow him to Mainz, and afterwards to Wittenberg, where he spent two years.  Here he conceived a high opinion of the Germans.  He foresaw that when they turned their attention from theology to science and pure speculation, great results might be expected from their solid intellectual capacity.  He seems in fact to have taken a pretty accurate measure of the race as it has subsequently shown itself.  Wittenberg he called the German Athens.  Luther, he recognized as a hero of humanity, who, like himself, defied authority in the defense of truth.  Yet he felt no sympathy for the German reformers.  When asked by the Inquisitors at Venice what he thought about these men, he replied:  ’I regard them as more ignorant than I am.  I despise them and their doctrines.  They do not deserve the name of theologians, but of pedants.’  That this reply was sincere, is abundantly proved by passages in the least orthodox of Bruno’s writings.  It was the weakness of a philosopher’s position at that moment that he derived no support from either of the camps into which Christendom was then divided.  Catholics and Protestants of every shade regarded him with mistrust.

A change in the religious policy of Saxony, introduced after the death of the Elector Augustus, caused Bruno to leave Wittenberg for Prague in 1588.  From Prague he passed to Helmstaedt, where the Duke Heinrich Julius of Brunswick-Wolfenbuettel received him with distinction, and bestowed on him a purse of eighty dollars.[98] Here he conceived two of his most important works, the De Monade and De Triplici Minimo, both written in Latin hexameters.[99] Why he adopted this new form of exposition is not manifest.  Possibly he was tired of dialogues, through which he had expressed his thought so freely in England.  Possibly a German public would have been indifferent to Italian.  Possibly he was emulous of his old masters, Parmenides and Lucretius.