k place, hearing the vague sounds of creatures and things,
precisely as, when reading certain pages of a beloved author, one hears
the sound of his voice.

The worship of Poverty of the early Franciscans had in it, then, nothing
ascetic or barbarous, nothing which recalls the Stylites or the Nazirs.
She was their bride, and like true lovers they felt no fatigues which
they might endure to find and remain near her.

La lor concordia e lor lieti sembianti,
Amor e maraviglia e dolce sguardo
Facean esser cagion de' pensier santi.[10]

To draw the portrait of an ideal knight at the beginning of the
thirteenth century is to draw Francis's very portrait, with this
difference, that what the knight did for his lady, he did for Poverty.
This comparison is not a mere caprice; he himself profoundly felt it and
expressed it with perfect clearness, and it is only by keeping it
clearly present in the mind that we can see into the very depth of his
heart.[11]

To find any other souls of the same nature one must come down to
Giovanni di Parma and Jacoponi di Todi. The life of St. Francis as
troubadour has been written; it would have been better to write it as
knight, for this is the explanation of his whole life, and as it were
the heart of his heart. From the day when, forgetting the songs of his
friends and suddenly stopped in the public place of Assisi, he met
Poverty, his bride, and swore to her faith and love, down to that
evening when, naked upon the naked earth of Portiuncula, he breathed out
his life, it may be said that all his thoughts went out to this lady of
his chaste loves. For twenty years he served her without faltering,
sometimes with an artlessness which would appear infantine, if something
infinitely sincere and sublime did not arrest the smile upon the most
sceptical lips.

Poverty agreed marvellously with that need which men had at that time,
and which perhaps they have lost less than they suppose, the need of an
ideal very high, very pure, mysterious, inaccessible, which yet they may
picture to themselves in concrete form. Sometimes a few privileged
disciples saw the lovely and pure Lady descend from heaven to salute her
spouse, but, whether visible or not, she always kept close beside her
Umbrian lover, as she kept close beside the Galilean; in the stable of
the nativity, upon the cross at Golgotha, and even in the borrowed tomb
where his body lay.

During several years this ideal was not alone that