His voice was weak; his style uncertain; his soul, we may believe, still wavering between strange dread and awful joy, as he beheld, through many a backward rolling mist of doubt, the mantle of the prophets descend upon him.
Already he had abandoned the schoolmen for the Bible.

Already he had learned by heart each verse of the Old and New Testaments.

Pondering on their texts, he had discovered four separate interpretations for every suggestion of Sacred Writ.

For some of the pregnant utterances of the prophets he found hundreds, pouring forth metaphor and illustration in wild and dazzling profusion of audacious, uncouth imagery.

The flame which began to smoulder in him at San Gemignano burst forth into a blaze at Brescia, in 1486.