, the Hussites--heretics in
whom the new light dimly shone, but who were instantly exterminated by
the Church.

We have to commemorate the vast conception of the emperor Frederick II,
who strove to found a new society of humane culture in the South of
Europe, and to anticipate the advent of the spirit of modern tolerance.
He, too, and all his race were exterminated by the papal jealousy. Truly
we may say with Michelet that the sibyl of the Renaissance kept offering
her books in vain to feudal Europe. In vain, because the time was not
yet. The ideas projected thus early on the modern world were immature
and abortive, like those headless trunks and zoophytic members of
half-moulded humanity which, in the vision of Empedocles, preceded the
birth of full-formed man. The nations were not ready. Franciscans
imprisoning Roger Bacon for venturing to examine what God had meant to
keep secret; Dominicans preaching crusades against the cultivated nobles
of Provence; popes stamping out the seed of enlightened Frederick;
Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical literature to make
way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the
parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by
sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with
demoniac zeal--these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe.
Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance were fragmentary
and sterile.

Then came a second period. Dante's poem, a work of conscious art,
conceived in a modern spirit and written in a modern tongue, was the
first true sign that Italy, the leader of the nations of the West, had
shaken off her sleep. Petrarch followed. His ideal of antique culture as
the everlasting solace and the universal education of the human race,
his lifelong effort to recover the classical harmony of thought and
speech, gave a direct impulse to one of the chief movements of the
Renaissance--its passionate outgoing toward the ancient world. After
Petrarch, Boccaccio opened yet another channel for the stream of
freedom. His conception of human existence as a joy to be accepted with
thanksgiving, not as a gloomy error to be rectified by suffering,
familiarized the fourteenth century with that form of semipagan gladness
that marked the real Renaissance.

In Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio Italy recovered the consciousness of
intellectual liberty. What we call the Renaissance had not yet arrived;