giac couplet, saying that, "from the sign below,
men may conjecture the mighty members of Roland, nephew of Charles; his
deeds are written in history." Three agreeable old gentlemen of Spello,
who attended us with much politeness, and were greatly interested in my
researches, pointed out a mark waist-high upon the wall, where Orlando's
knee is reported to have reached. But I could not learn anything about a
phallic monolith, which is said by Guerin or Panizzi to have been
identified with the Roland myth at Spello. Such a column either never
existed here, or had been removed before the memory of the present
generation.

EASTER MORNING AT ASSISI.

We are in the lower church of S. Francesco. High mass is being sung,
with orchestra and organ and a choir of many voices. Candles are lighted
on the altar, over-canopied with Giotto's allegories. From the low
southern windows slants the sun, in narrow bands, upon the many-coloured
gloom and embrowned glory of these painted aisles. Women in bright
kerchiefs kneel upon the stones, and shaggy men from the mountains stand
or lean against the wooden benches. There is no moving from point to
point. Where we have taken our station, at the north-western angle of
the transept, there we stay till mass be over. The whole low-vaulted
building glows duskily; the frescoed roof, the stained windows, the
figure-crowded pavements blending their rich but subdued colours, like
hues upon some marvellous moth's wings, or like a deep-toned rainbow
mist discerned in twilight dreams, or like such tapestry as Eastern
queens, in ancient days, wrought for the pavilion of an empress. Forth
from this maze of mingling tints, indefinite in shade and sunbeams, lean
earnest, saintly faces--ineffably pure--adoring, pitying, pleading;
raising their eyes in ecstasy to heaven, or turning them in ruth toward
earth. Men and women of whom the world was not worthy--at the hands of
those old painters they have received the divine grace, the dove-like
simplicity, whereof Italians in the fourteenth century possessed the
irrecoverable secret. Each face is a poem; the counterpart in painting
to a chapter from the Fioretti di San Francesco. Over the whole
scene--in the architecture, in the frescoes, in the coloured windows, in
the gloom, on the people, in the incense, from the chiming bells,
through the music--broods one spirit: the spirit of him who was "the
co-espoused, co-transforate with Christ;" the ardent, the radia