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, 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  And, in interpreting these, the philosopher, whose intellectual ardours have superseded religion and love, is still a lover and a monk.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.