It is thus
that Sir Thomas More translates the words of the biographer of Pico,
who, even in outward form and appearance, seems an image of that inward
harmony and completeness, of which he is so perfect an example. The word
mystic has been usually derived from a Greek word which signifies to
shut, as if one shut one's lips, brooding on what cannot be uttered; but
the Platonists themselves derive it rather from the act of shutting the
eyes, that one may see the more, inwardly. Perhaps the eyes of the
mystic Ficino, now long past the midway of life, had come to be thus
half-closed; but when a young man, not unlike the archangel Raphael, as
the Florentines of that age depicted him in his wonderful walk with
Tobit, or Mercury, as he might have appeared in a painting by Sandro
Botticelli or Piero di Cosimo, entered his chamber, he seems to have
thought there was something not wholly earthly about him; at least, he
ever afterwards believed that it was not without the co-operation of the
stars that the stranger had arrived on that day.
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