Читать книгу Rebels and Reformers: Biographies for Young People онлайн

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When he was nineteen he fell in love with a girl of the Strozzi family, but he was rejected with disdain and told he was not sufficiently well born to aspire to one of such noble birth. This added to the bitterness of his heart, and his disgust for the world increased. For two years he struggled with himself, uncertain whether he should obey his parents or follow his own inclinations; and he prayed daily, “Lord, teach me the way my soul should walk.” At last, in despair, he abandoned his medical studies, left home, and fled secretly to a Dominican monastery at Bologna, where he became a monk. Villari the historian describes the touching scene on the very eve of his departure: “He was sitting with his lute and playing a sad melody; his mother, as if moved by a spirit of divination, turned suddenly round to him and exclaimed mournfully, ‘My son, this is a sign we are soon to part.’ He roused himself and continued, but with a trembling hand, to touch the strings of the lute without raising his eyes from the ground.” The next day he was gone. He wrote from Bologna to tell his father of his determination to renounce the world, where virtue was despised and vice held in honor. In the convent he began at once to wear himself to a shadow by acting as a servant and humbling himself by a life of the severest simplicity and discipline. In “The Ruin of the World,” a poem he wrote when he was twenty, he says, “The world is in confusion; all virtue is extinguished and all good manners. I find no living light abroad, nor one who blushes for his vices.”