The unity, the spiritual unity, of the world :—­that must involve the alliance, the congruity, of all things with each other, great reinforcement of sympathy, of the teacher’s personality with the doctrine he had to deliver, the spirit of that doctrine with the fashion of his utterance.  In his own case, certainly, as Bruno confronted his audience at Paris, himself, his theme, his language, were the fuel of one clear spiritual flame, which soon had hold of his audience also; alien, strangely alien, as it might seem from the speaker.  It was intimate discourse, in magnetic touch with every one present, with his special point of impressibility; the sort of speech which, consolidated into literary form as a book, would be a dialogue according to the true Attic genius, full of those diversions, passing irritations, unlooked-for appeals, in which a solicitous missionary finds his largest range of opportunity, and takes even dull wits unaware.  In Bruno, that abstract theory of the perpetual motion of the world was a visible person talking with you.

And as the runaway Dominican was still in temper a monk, so he presented himself in the comely Dominican habit.  The eyes which in their last sad protest against stupidity would mistake, or miss altogether, the image of the Crucified, were to-day, for the most part, kindly observant eyes, registering every detail of that singular company, all the physiognomic lights which come by the way on people, and, through them, on things, the “shadows of ideas” in men’s faces (De Umbris Idearum was the title of his discourse), himself pleasantly animated by them, in turn.  There was “heroic gaiety” there; only, as usual with gaiety, the passage of a peevish cloud seemed all the chillier.  Lit up, in the agitation of speaking, by many a harsh or scornful beam, yet always sinking, in moments of repose, to an expression of high-bred melancholy, it was a face that looked, after all, made for suffering—­already half pleading, half defiant—­as of a creature you could hurt, but to the last never shake a hair’s breadth from its estimate of yourself.

Like nature, like nature in that country of his birth, the Nolan, as he delighted to proclaim himself, loved so well that, born wanderer as he was, he must perforce return thither sooner or later, at the risk of life, he gave plenis manibus, but without selection, and, with all his contempt for the “asinine” vulgar, was not fastidious.  His rank, unweeded eloquence, abounding in a play of words, rabbinic allegories, verses defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition he professed to despise, with a shameless image here or there, product not of formal method, but of Neapolitan improvisation, was akin to [243] the heady wine, the sweet, coarse odours, of that fiery, volcanic soil, fertile in the irregularities which manifest power.  Helping himself indifferently to all religions for rhetoric illustration, his preference was still for that of the soil, the old pagan one,