sipations began again. He did his part in them
so well that he soon fell gravely ill.[1] For long weeks he looked
death so closely in the face that the physical crisis brought about a
moral one. Thomas of Celano has preserved for us an incident of
Francis's convalescence. He was regaining strength little by little and
had begun to go about the house, when one day he felt a desire to walk
abroad, to contemplate nature quietly, and so take hold again of life.
Leaning on a stick he bent his steps toward the city gate.

The nearest one, called _Porta Nuova_, is the very one which opens upon
the finest scenery. Immediately on passing through it one finds one's
self in the open country; a fold of the hill hides the city, and cuts
off every sound that might come from it. Before you lies the winding
road to Foligno; at the left the imposing mass of Mount Subasio; at the
right the Umbrian plain with its farms, its villages, its cloud-like
hills, on whose slopes pines, cedars, oaks, the vine, and the olive-tree
shed abroad an incomparable brightness and animation. The whole country
sparkles with beauty, a beauty harmonious and thoroughly human, that is,
made to the measure of man.

Francis had hoped by this sight to recover the delicious sensations of
his youth. With the sharpened sensibility of the convalescent he
breathed in the odors of the spring-time, but spring-time did not come,
as he had expected, to his heart. This smiling nature had for him only a
message of sadness. He had believed that the breezes of this beloved
country-side would carry away the last shudders of the fever, and
instead he felt in his heart a discouragement a thousand-fold more
painful than any physical ill. The miserable emptiness of his life
suddenly appeared before him; he was terrified at his solitude, the
solitude of a great soul in which there is no altar.

Memories of the past assailed him with intolerable bitterness; he was
seized with a disgust of himself, his former ambitions seemed to him
ridiculous or despicable. He went home overwhelmed with the weight of a
new suffering.

In such hours of moral anguish man seeks a refuge either in love or in
faith. Unhappily the family and friends of Francis were incapable of
understanding him. As to religion, it was for him, as for the greater
number of his contemporaries, that crass fetichism with Christian
terminology which is far from having entirely disappeared. With certain
men, in fact, piety c