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.
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