268 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



Ma 'n primavera eterna 



Ch' hora s' accende et verna 



Rise di luce, et di sereno il cielo, 



Ne porto peregrine 



O' guerra, o merce a' P altrui lidi il pino. 



Ma legge aurea et felice 



Che natura scolpi. S' ei piace, ei lice. 1 



Bruno was no imperialist. Nature seemed to him 

 to have fixed definite boundaries to the extension of the 

 different races, by which the special genius of each was 

 kept pure. In the Cena (126. 9) Tiphys and his 

 successors (Columbus, Vespucci, and others are meant, 

 although not named) are said to have " discovered means 

 of disturbing the peace of peoples, violating the natural 

 trend of the genius of countries, confounding what fore- 

 seeing nature had distinguished, doubling, through com- 

 merce, evil feelings, adding the vices of one race to those 

 of another, propagating new incitements, instruments, 

 methods of tyranny and assassination, which in time, 

 by the natural vicissitude of things, would recoil upon 

 our own heads." 2 It was really, he thought, for the 

 advantage of men themselves that the world-regions 

 should be kept as distinct in their usages and customs 

 as they are physically distinct by the natural divisions 

 of mountains and tracts of sea. From region to region, 

 vice and the poison of perverse laws and religions, the 

 materials of discord and extermination, were propagated 

 and disseminated to the suffocation of every good fruit ; 

 there were no advantages which could compare with 



1 From Tasso's Aminta^ act i. sub fin. Bruno hardly ever mentions the 

 authors of the poems in his ethical works, so that the layman in literature has great 

 difficulty in knowing which, if any, are his own. Thus Rixner and Siber translate 

 the above, and give it as Bruno's (op. cit. p. 230). In the fourth line Bruno reads 

 " E 'n " for " Ma 'n." 2 Cf. Infinite, p. 398. 16. 



