, and
faithfully kept promises, expecting from the wolf fidelity to his word
as much as from a human being. There is in this little book a vague,
floating, permeating life of affection, of love unbounded by difference
of species. Communion with all men, with Christ, with angels, with
doves, and with wolves; the force of love bringing down God and raising
up brutes to the level of these saints. And as we think over the little
book we feel in a way as if we, to whom Francis and his companions
are mere mortal men, and the tales of the "Fioretti" mere beautiful
fancies, hollow and sad for their very sweetness, were looking down upon
a sort of holy land, as we look down in the white twilight upon the
misty undulations of this solemn and beautiful Umbria.

A serene country, neither rugged and barren, nor flat and fertile, not
the grey, sharp Florentine valley, whose thin soil must be irrigated
and ploughed, and on whose hillsides the carefully nurtured olives are
stunted with winter wind and summer scorchings, where every outline is
clear and bone-like in that same hard, light atmosphere which, as Vasari
says, makes all appear hard and clear and logical to the minds of the
Florentines. Not the endless flatness and fruitfulness of Lombardy,
where the mists steam up in the evening golden round the great misty
golden descending sun-ball, and the buildings flush like the cheeks of
Correggio's joy-drunken seraphs, and the thin, clear outline of the rows
of poplars looks against the sky like the outshaken golden hair combed
into minute filaments of one of Lionardo's women. Nor the dreary wastes
of sere oakwoods and livid sand-hills of Orvieto; nor the sea of lush
vegetation gilded by the sun, merging into the vaporous damp blue sky
of the plain of Lucca. None of these things is the Tiber valley, not
harsh nor poor nor luxuriant; sober and restrained, without excess or
scantness, an undulating country of pale and modest tints, and, save in
the distant Apennine tops, of simple outline, with what glory of colours
it may have, due mainly to sky and sunset of cloud, and even in that
more chaste than other parts of Italy; neither poor nor rich; without
the commerce of Lombardy or the industry of Tuscany, wholly without
any intellectual movement, rural, believing, with but little of the
imported influence of reviving Paganism, and still much of the clinging
moral atmosphere of Christian contemplation and ecstacy of the days of
St. Francis