silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me":-- Le silence eternel de
ces espaces infinis m'effraie.

He was already almost wearied out when he came to Florence.
He had loved much and been beloved by women, "wandering
over the crooked hills of delicious pleasure"; but their reign over
him was over, and long before Savonarola's famous "bonfire of
vanities," he had destroyed those love-songs in the vulgar tongue,
which would have been so great a relief to us, after the scholastic
prolixity of his Latin writings. It was in another spirit that he
composed a Platonic commentary, the only work of his in Italian
which has come down to us, on the "Song of Divine Love"--
secondo la mente ed opinione dei Platonici--"according to the
mind and opinion of the Platonists," by his friend Hieronymo
Beniveni, in which, with an ambitious array of every sort of
learning, and a profusion of imagery borrowed indifferently from
the astrologers, the Cabala, and Homer, and Scripture, and
Dionysius the Areopagite, he attempts to define the stages by
which the soul passes from the earthly to the unseen beauty. A
change indeed had passed over him, as if the chilling touch of the
abstract and disembodied beauty Platonists profess to long for
were already upon him. Some sense of this, perhaps, coupled
with that over-brightness which in the popular imagination
always betokens an early [43] death, made Camilla Rucellai, one
of those prophetic women whom the preaching of Savonarola had
raised up in Florence, declare, seeing him for the first time, that
he would depart in the time of lilies--prematurely, that is, like the
field-flowers which are withered by the scorching sun almost as
soon as they are sprung up. He now wrote down those thoughts
on the religious life which Sir Thomas More turned into English,