Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/53

Rh the vulgar tongue which would have been such 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 that abstract, disembodied beauty which the Platonists profess to long for, had already touched him; and perhaps it was a sense of this, coupled with that over-brightness of his, which in the popular imagination always betokens an early death, that made Camilla Rucellai, one of those prophetesses whom the preaching of Savonarola had raised up in Florence, prophesy, 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 have sprung up. It was now that he wrote