l cedars, beasts and all cattle, creeping things and fowls with wings,
kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all judges of the earth,
young men and maidens, old men and children, praise the Lord, praise ye
the Lord!"

The day of the birds of Bevagna remained in his memory as one of the
most beautiful of his whole life, and though usually so reserved he
always loved to tell of it;[18] it was because he owed to Clara these
pure ardors which brought him into a secret and delicious communion with
all beings; it was she who had revived him from sadness and hesitation;
in his heart he bore an immense gratitude to her who, just when he
needed it, had known how to return to him love for love, inspiration for
inspiration.

Francis's sympathy for animals, as we see it shining forth here, has
none of that sentimentalism, so often artificial and exclusive of all
other love, which certain associations of his time noisily displayed; in
him it is only a manifestation of his feeling for nature, a deeply
mystical, one might say pantheistic, sentiment, if the word had not a
too definitely philosophical sense, quite opposite to the Franciscan
thought.

This sentiment, which in the poets of the thirteenth century is so often
false and affected, was in him not only true, but had in it something
alive, healthy, robust.[19] It is this vein of poetry which awoke
Italy to self-consciousness, made her in a few years forget the
nightmare of Catharist ideas, and rescued her from pessimism. By it
Francis became the forerunner of the artistic movement which preceded
the Renaissance, the inspirer of that group of Pre-Raphaelites, awkward,
grotesque in drawing though at times they were, to whom we turn to-day
with a sort of piety, finding in their ungraceful saints an inner life,
a moral feeling which we seek for elsewhere in vain.

If the voice of the Poverello of Assisi was so well understood it was
because in this matter, as in all others, it was entirely
unconventional. How far we are, with him, from the fierce or Pharisaic
piety of those monks which forbids even the females of animals to enter
their convent! His notion of chastity in no sense resembles this
excessive prudery. One day at Sienna he asked for some turtle-doves, and
holding them in the skirt of his tunic, he said: "Little sisters
turtle-doves, you are simple, innocent, and chaste; why did you let
yourselves be caught? I shall save you from death, and have nests made
fo