LIII.  A singular argument concerning prayer.  Campanella says it is impious to hope to change the order and facts of the world, arranged by God, except in the single category of time.  He therefore thinks it lawful for him to ask, and for God to grant, a shortening of the season of his suffering.  See the Canzone translated by me, forming Appendix I.

LIV.  Another sonnet referring to his life in prison.  He asks God how he can prosper if his friends all fail him for various reasons.  Lines 9-11 refer to the visit of a foe in disguise who came to him in prison and promised him liberty, probably with a view to extracting from him admissions of state-treason or of heresy.  See the Canzone translated in Appendix I. The last three lines seem to express his unalterable courage, and his readiness to act if only God will give him trustworthy instruments and fill him with His own spirit.  The Dantesque language of the last line is almost incapable of reproduction: 

    Ch’ io m’ intuassi come tu t’ immii.

LV.  Campanella tells his friend that such trivial things as pastoral poems will not immortalise him.  He bids him seek, not outside in worn out fictions, but within his own soul, for the spirit of true beauty, turn to God for praise, instead of to a human audience, and go with the tabula rasa of childlike intelligence into God’s school of Nature.  Compare Nos I., V.

LVI.  Campanella recognised in Telesio the founder of the new philosophy, which discarded the ancients and the schoolmen.  Line 3:  the tyrant is Aristotle.  Lines 5 and 6:  Bombino and Montano are the poets.  Lines 7-9:  Cavalcante and Gaieta were disciples of the Cosentine Academy founded by Telesio.  Line 9:  our saint, la gran donna, is the new philosophy.  Line 12:  my tocsin, mia squilla, is a pun on Campanella’s name.

LVII.  Rudolph von Bunau set himself at the age of sixteen to philosophise, travelled with Adami, and with him visited Campanella in prison at Naples.  Campanella cast his horoscope and predicted for him a splendid career, exhorting him to make war upon the pernicious school of philosophers, who encumbered the human reason with frauds and figments, and prevented the free growth of a better method.

LVIII.  Adami, to whom we owe the first edition of these sonnets, visited Campanella in the Castle of S. Elmo, having wandered through many lands, like Diogenes, in search of a man.  Line 5:  this, says Adami, ’refers to a dream or vision of a sword, great and marvellous, with three triple joints, and arms, and other things, discovered by Tobia Adami, which the author interpreted by his primalities’—­that is, I suppose, by the trinity of power, love, wisdom, mentioned in No.  VII.  Line 6:  Abaddon is the opposite of Christ, the lord of the evil of the age.  Cp. note to No.  XLI.