With a nature ardent and combative, worked up to the highest pitch of ascetic intolerance by the introspective musings of his cell, it may readily be conceived that the corruptions of the church filled him with warm indignation and fierce desire to restore it to its pristine purity. To this holy cause he devoted the last half of his life, and was always ready, with tongue and pen, at the sacrifice of his dearly prized solitude, to further the great movement on which he felt that the future of Christianity depended. The brief hopes excited by the promises of Clement and Henry were speedily quenched by the untimely death of the German pontiff, and the most sanguine might well despair at seeing the odious Benedict IX. reinstated as pope. But the emperor was in earnest, and listened willingly to the cry of those who besought him not to leave his good work unfinished. Nine brief months saw Benedict again a wanderer, and another German prelate installed in his place. Poppo of Brixen, however, enjoyed his new dignity, as Damasus II., but twenty-one days, when he fell a martyr to the cause, perishing miserably, either through the insalubrious heats of a Roman summer, or the hidden vindictiveness of Italian party rage. It required some courage to accept the honorable but fatal post, and six months elapsed ere a worthy candidate could be found. Henry’s choice this time fell upon Bruno of Toul, a prelate to whom admiring biographers ascribe every virtue and every qualification. As Leo IX. he ascended the pontifical throne in February, 1049, and he soon gave ample evidence of the sincerity with which he intended to carry out the views of the puritans whom he represented. It was significant that he took with him to Rome the monk Hildebrand, lately released from the service of his master Gregory VI., who had died in his German exile, restored by a miracle at his death to the honors of which he had been adjudged unworthy while living.[458] Still more significant was the fact that Leo entered Rome, not as pope, but as a barefooted pilgrim, and that he required the empty formality of an election within the city, as though the nomination of the emperor had given him no claim to his high office. Whether this was the result of a voice from heaven, as related by the papal historians,[459] or whether it was done at the suggestion of the high-churchman Hildebrand, it showed that the new pontiff magnified his office, and felt that the line of distinction between the clerk and the layman was to be sharply drawn and vigorously defended.