Giordano Bruno
by Walter Pater
- Pages
- about 20
- Category
- History
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 22 min at 250 wpm
From the opening
"Jetzo, da ich ausgewachsen,
Viel gelesen, viel gereist,
Schwillt mein Herz, und ganz von Herzen,
Glaub' ich an den Heilgen Geist."--Heine+
[234] IT was on the afternoon of the Feast of Pentecost that news of
the death of Charles the Ninth went abroad promptly. To his
successor the day became a sweet one, to be noted unmistakably by
various pious and other observances; and it was on a Whit-Sunday
afternoon that curious Parisians had the opportunity of listening to
one who, as if with some intentional new version of the sacred event
then commemorated, had a great deal to say concerning the Spirit;
above all, of the freedom, the independence of its operation. The
speaker, though understood to be a brother of the Order of St.
Dominic, had not been present at the mass--the usual university mass,
De Spiritu Sancto, said to-day according to the natural course of the
season in the chapel of the Sorbonne, by the Italian Bishop of Paris.
It was the reign of the Italians just then, a doubly refined,
somewhat morbid, somewhat ash-coloured, Italy in France, more Italian
still. Men of Italian birth, "to the great suspicion of simple
people," swarmed in Paris, already "flightier, less constant, than
the girouettes on its steeples," and it was love for Italian fashions
that had brought king and courtiers here to-day, with great eclat, as
they said, frizzed and starched, in the beautiful, minutely
considered dress of the moment, pressing the university into a
perhaps not unmerited background; for the promised speaker, about
whom tongues had been busy, not only in the Latin quarter, had come
from Italy. In an age in which all things about which Parisians much
cared must be Italian there might be a hearing for Italian
philosophy. Courtiers at least would understand Italian, and this
speaker was rumoured to possess in perfection all the curious arts of
his native language.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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