forbid I should attempt to turn him into a brother
Lippo, of the Landor or Browning pattern! He was very far indeed, let
alone from profanity, even from such flesh and blood feeling as that of
Jacopone and scores of other blessed ones. He was, emotionally, rather
bloodless; and whatsoever energy he had probably went in tussels with
the technical problems of the day, of which he knew much more, for
all his cloistered look, than I suspected when I wrote of him before.
Angelico, to return to the question, was not a St. Francis, a Fra
Jacopone. But even Angelico had his passionately human side, though it
was only the humanness of a nice child. In a life of hard study, and
perhaps hard penance, that childish blessed one nourished childish
desires--desires for green grass and flowers, for gay clothes,[5] for
prettily-dressed pink and lilac playfellows, for the kissing and hugging
in which he had no share, for the games of the children outside the
convent gate. How human, how ineffably full of a good child's longing,
is not his vision of Paradise! The gaily-dressed angels are leading the
little cowled monks--little baby black and white things, with pink faces
like sugar lambs and Easter rabbits--into deep, deep grass quite full
of flowers, the sort of grass every child on this wicked earth has been
cruelly forbidden to wade in! They fall into those angels' arms, hugging
them with the fervour of children in the act of _loving_ a cat or a dog.
They join hands with those angels, outside the radiant pink and blue
toy-box towers of the celestial Jerusalem, and go singing "Round the
Mulberry Bush" much more like the babies in Kate Greenaway's books than
like the Fathers of the Church in Dante. The joys of Paradise, for this
dear man of God, are not confined to sitting _ad dexteram domini_....

[Footnote 5: Mme. Darmesteter's charming essays "The End of the Middle
Ages," contain some amusing instances of such repressed love of finery
on the part of saints. Compare Fioretti xx., "And these garments of
such fair cloth, which we wear (in Heaven) are given us by God in
exchange for our rough frocks."]

_Di questo nostro dolce Fratellino_; that line of Jacopone da Todi,
hymning to the child Christ, sums up, in the main, the vivifying spirit
of early Italian art; nay, is it not this mingled emotion of tenderness,
of reverence, and deepest brotherhood which made St. Francis claim sun
and birds, even the naughty wolf, for brethren?