or Italy is a sunny land
where clear air makes clear minds, blandly or keenly observant of the
world, and never impelled by onset of outer mists and darkness to tend a
flickering light within themselves. There was melancholy, high and
stately, such as Lucretius knew, when he went lonely among the
homesteads or along the shore; but it was too exalted to be one with
diffidence, for he who will hold the sum of things in his thoughts walks
on clouds above the heads of men, free of all misgiving. Perhaps beyond
the Alps, in some Rhaetian upland where Roman dignity was interfused with
old barbaric roughness, the first signs of our malady were perceived and
the first ancestor of all the shy was born. But even yet the time was
not ripe, nor the place prepared. Christianity had to come, turning
men's eyes inwards and proclaiming the error of the objective pagan way.
A new feeling, the sense of personal unworthiness before God, spreading
through the Roman world, now stirred mankind to still communing with
themselves, and sanctioned the stealing away from the noisy festivals of
life. By enjoining a search into the depths of the heart, it encouraged
the growth of a self-consciousness hitherto unknown. It was not always a
panic of contrition, sweeping the joyous out of the sunlight into a
monastic shade, which brought the troubled into a new way of peace, but
sometimes a quiet joy in renunciation, congruous with a timid mood,
leading by gradual allurement to cloisters of shadowy lanes and cells
which were forest bowers. The new faith gave open sanction to evasion of
the banquet, and thus fortified and increased those who loved not the
ceremonial day. The spirit of solitude, no more a maenad, but a nun,
sheltered earth's children in the folds of her robe, and no man said her
nay.

Moreover, Christianity quickened the force of that feminine influence
which Rome had first set flowing through the civilized world, but
diverted the stream from irregular and torrential courses into a smooth
channel gliding amid sacred groves. It clothed woman with ideal grace
and virtue, and perceived in her powers which the virile mind could
never wield. "Inesse quinetiam sanctum aliquid et providum putant, nec
aut consilia earum aspernantur, nec responsa negligunt." So our
ancestors held in the northern woods, and Christianity, purifying and
expanding their belief, fulfilled it with a new perfection.

But this gradual binding of all men's limbs in silke