Plato, as other men burned lamps before their favourite saints, a
young man fresh from a journey, "of feature and shape seemly
and beauteous, of stature goodly and high, of flesh tender and
soft, his visage lovely and fair, his colour white, intermingled
with comely reds, his eyes grey, and quick of look, his teeth
white and even, his hair yellow and abundant," and trimmed with
more than the usual artifice of the time.

It is thus that Sir Thomas More translates the words of the
biographer of Pico, who, even in outward form and appearance,
seems an image of that inward harmony and completeness, of
which he is so perfect an example. The word mystic has been
usually derived from a Greek word which signifies to shut, as if
one shut one's lips brooding on what cannot be uttered; but the
Platonists themselves derive it rather from the act of shutting the
eyes, that one may see the more, inwardly. Perhaps the eyes of
the mystic Ficino, now long past the midway of life, had come to
be thus half-closed; but when a young man, not unlike the
archangel Raphael, as the Florentines of that age depicted him in
his wonderful walk with Tobit, or Mercury, as he might have
appeared in a painting by Sandro Botticelli or Piero di Cosimo,
entered his chamber, he seems to have thought there was
something not wholly earthly about [38] him; at least, he ever
afterwards believed that it was not without the co-operation of the
stars that the stranger had arrived on that day. For it happened
that they fell into a conversation, deeper and more intimate than
men usually fall into at first sight. During this conversation
Ficino formed the design of devoting his remaining years to the
translation of Plotinus, that new Plato, in whom the mystical
element in the Platonic philosophy had been worked out to the