"Suddenly there
appeared to him an angel in a great radiance, which angel held a viol
in his left hand and a bow in his right. And while St. Francis remained
in stupefaction at the sight, this angel drew the bow once _upwards_
across the viol, and instantly there issued such sweetness of melody as
melted the soul of St. Francis, and suspended it from all bodily sense.
And, as he afterwards told his companions, he was of opinion that if
that angel had drawn the bow _downwards_ (instead of upwards) across the
viol, his soul would have departed from his body for the very excess of
delight."

It was not so much to save the souls of men from hell, about which,
indeed, there is comparatively little talk in the _Fioretti_, but to
draw them also into the mystic circle where such angelic music was
heard, that Francis of Assisi preached throughout Umbria, and even
as far as the Soldan's country; and, if we interpret it rightly, the
strings of that heavenly viol were the works of creation and the souls
of all creatures, and the bow, whose upward movement ravished, and whose
downward movement would have almost annihilated with its sweetness, that
bow drawn across the vibrating world was no other than love.

IV

Justice preached by Hebrew prophets, charity and purity taught by Jesus
of Nazareth, fortitude recommended by Epictetus and Aurelius, none of
these great messages to men necessarily produce that special response
which we call Art. But the message of loving joyfulness, of happiness
in the world and the world's creatures, whether men or birds, or sun
or moon,--this message, which was that of St. Francis, sets the soul
singing; and just such singing of the soul makes art. Hence, even as
the Apennine blazed with supernatural light, and its forests and rocks
became visible to the most distant wayfarers, when the Eternal Love
smote with its beams the praying saint on La Vernia; so also the souls
of those men of the Middle Ages were made luminous and visible by the
miracle of poetry and painting, and we can see them still, distinct even
at this distance.

One of the earliest of the souls so revealed is that of the Blessed
Jacopone of Todi. Jacopo dei Benedetti, a fellow-countryman of St.
Francis, must have been born in the middle of the thirteenth century,
and is said to have died in 1316, when Dante, presumably, was writing
his "Purgatory" and "Paradise;" to him is ascribed the authorship of
the hymn "Stabat Mater," rememb