This is indeed the text, but is not a comment inevitable? What! Bruno would have us believe that in 1576 he is of such fearful mood and timid temper that, having no more on his conscience than the events recited, he abandons church and country, peace and security at the mere frown of his Order, but that in 1592, having in the meanwhile upset, smashed, and abused the Christian world, he can look upon the Inquisition without fear, bethinking him that he had harmed no man in living in his own way? However, flee he did. What followed on this flight he recounts to his judges as his trial proceeds. Sixteen years of as hard-driven a life as one could wish for one’s dearest foe, from Italy to Switzerland (to the Geneva of Calvin’s day, where one may imagine that Bruno was as much at home as fire on an iceberg), then across to France, from Lyons to Toulouse, from Toulouse to Paris, from France to England, from London back to Paris, then hastily to Germany, through many German and Bohemian cities! Sixteen years of homeless, friendless poverty, now teaching small boys, now lecturing at great universities, now living with fine gentlemen, received by a king or a queen, now gathering a few curious students about him, who somehow confused the promise of the great idea with old mysteries and the arts we call black. Until at last we find him at Frankfurt receiving Mocenigo’s letters promising him a home in Italy, his native land, and a treatment that should content him. Yet these years of travail were those in which his works were written, the Italian dialogues in England, the Latin poems in Germany. The great idea had received full expression, the “Excubitor,” as Bruno called himself, the Awakener of sleeping minds, had blown his trumpet and the walls of the world had fallen. Splendid is the enthusiasm with which Bruno first announces this new vision of the morning: “Lo! here is one who has swept the air, pierced the heavens, sped by the stars and passed beyond the bounds of the world, who has annihilated the fantastic spheres with which foolish mathematicians and vulgar philosophers had closed us in. The key of his diligent curiosity has opened to the view of every sense and every power of reason such closets of truth as can be opened by us. He has stripped nature of her robe and veil. He has given eyes to the mole, vision to the blind.... No longer is our reason imprisoned within the confines of imaginary heavens.... We know that there is but one heaven, one immense ether, where magnificent fires maintain their proper distances by reason of that eternal life in which they have part. These flaming bodies are the ambassadors which announce the excellence of God’s glory and majesty.”