of an atom of earth, cell, sphere, within sphere.  But the earth itself, hitherto seemingly the privileged centre of a very limited universe, was, after all, itself but an atom in an infinite world of starry space, then lately displayed to the ingenuous intelligence, which the telescope was one day to verify to bodily eyes.  For if Bruno must needs look forward to the future, to Bacon, for adequate knowledge of the earth—­the infinitely little; he looked back, gratefully, to another daring mind, which had already put the earth into its modest place, and opened the full view of the heavens.  If God is eternal, then, the universe is infinite and worlds innumerable.  Yes! one might well have supposed what reason now demonstrated, indicating those endless spaces which sidereal science would gradually occupy, an echo of the creative word of God himself,

“Qui innumero numero innumerorum nomina dicit.”

That the stars are suns:  that the earth is in motion:  that the earth is of like stuff with the stars:  now the familiar knowledge of children, dawning on Bruno as calm assurance of reason on appeal from the prejudice of the eye, brought to him an inexpressibly exhilarating sense of enlargement of the intellectual, nay! the physical atmosphere.  And his consciousness of unfailing unity and order did not desert him in that larger survey, making the utmost one could ever know of the earth seem but a very little chapter in that endless history of God the Spirit, rejoicing so greatly in the admirable spectacle that it never ceases to evolve from matter new conditions.  The immovable earth beneath one’s feet! one almost felt the movement, the respiration of God in it.  And yet how greatly even the physical eye, the sensible imagination (so to term it) was flattered by the theorem.  What joy in that motion, the prospect, the music, the music of the spheres !—­he could listen to it in a perfection such as had never been conceded to Plato, to Pythagoras even.

     “Veni, Creator Spiritus,
     Mentes tuorum visita,
     Imple superna gratia,
     Quae tu creasti pectora!”

Yes! the grand old Christian hymns, perhaps the grandest of them, seemed to blend themselves in the chorus, to deepen immeasurably under this new intention.  It is not always, or often, that men’s abstract ideas penetrate the temperament, touch the animal spirits, affect conduct.  It was what they did with Bruno.  The ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe, infinite dust, in truth, starry as it may look to our terrestrial eyes—­that prospect from which Pascal’s faithful soul recoiled so painfully—­induced in Bruno only the delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship [241] and sympathy, since every one of those infinite worlds must have its sympathetic inhabitants.  Scruples of conscience, if he felt such, might well be pushed aside for the “excellency” of such knowledge as this.  To shut the eyes, whether