ch stands Perugia we
meet the teams of huge oxen, not merely white, but milky, with great,
deep, long-lashed eyes, swaying from side to side with their load of
wine-vats; and the peasants returning home from ploughing up the last
corn stubble. All is peaceful and very solemn, more so than after sunset
in other places, in this sweet and austere Umbria, the fit home of the
Christian revival of the early Middle Ages. And it makes us think, this
beautiful and solemn evening, of the little book which epitomises all
the emotions of this new birth, of this charming new childhood of
humanity, when the feelings of men seem to have somewhat of the dewy
freshness of dawn. The book is the "Fioretti di San Francesco," a
collection of legends and examples relating to the cycle of St. Francis
of Assisi by some monk or monks of the end of the thirteenth century.
Flowerets they may well be called--flowers such as might grow, green
and white-starred and delicately pearled with gold, in the thick grass
across which dance Angelico's groups of the Blessed. Yet with a certain
humanness, a certain reality and naturalness of sweetness, such as
the great paradise painter, with his fleshless madonnas, his glory
of radiant, unearthly draperies and golden skies, never could have
conceived. A singular charm of simplicity and lucidness in this little
book; no fever visions or unhealthy glories; an earnestness not without
humour: there is nothing grim or absurd in the credulity and asceticism
of these Umbrian saints. The asceticism is so gentle and tender, the
credulity so childish and poetical, that the ridiculous itself ceases to
be so. These monks, so far from being engrossed with the care of their
own souls, or weighed down by the dread of hell, seemed to have awakened
with perfect hope and faith in celestial goodness, with perfect desire
to love all around them in the most literal sense: religion for them is
love and reliance on love. The gentleness with which they admonish the
sinning and back-sliding, the confidence in the inner goodness of man,
from whose soiled surface all evil may be washed, extends in these men
to the whole of creation, and makes them fraternise with beasts and
birds, as is shown, with a delicate, slightly humorous grace, in the
stories of St. Francis and the turtle doves, and of the ferocious wolf
"Frate Lupo" of Gubbio, whom rather than kill, it pleased the saint
to bring round to harmlessness by fair words, expostulations