ties and endowed with every kind of
sensibility were frequent. Nor was there any limit to the play of
personality in action. We may apply to them what Browning has written of
Sordello's temperament:

"A footfall there
Suffices to upturn to the warm air
Half-germinating spices, mere decay
Produces richer life, and day by day
New pollen on the lily-petal grows,
And still more labyrinthine buds the rose."

During the Middle Ages man had lived enveloped in a cowl. He had not
seen the beauty of the world, or had seen it only to cross himself, and
turn aside and tell his beads and pray. Like St. Bernard travelling
along the shores of Lake Leman, and noticing neither the azure of the
waters nor the luxuriance of the vines, nor the radiance of the
mountains with their robe of sun and snow, but bending a
thought-burdened forehead over the neck of his mule--even like this
monk, humanity had passed, a careful pilgrim, intent on the terrors of
sin, death, and judgment, along the highways of the world, and had not
known that they were sightworthy, or that life is a blessing. Beauty is
a snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man fallen and lost,
death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell everlasting, heaven
hard to win, ignorance is acceptable to God as a proof of faith and
submission, abstinence and mortification are the only safe rules of
life--these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic mediaeval Church. The
Renaissance shattered and destroyed them, rending the thick veil which
they had drawn between the mind of man and the outer world, and flashing
the light of reality upon the darkened places of his own nature. For the
mystic teaching of the Church was substituted culture in the classical
humanities; a new ideal was established, whereby man strove to make
himself the monarch of the globe on which it is his privilege as well as
destiny to live. The Renaissance was the liberation of humanity from a
dungeon, the double discovery of the outer and the inner world.

An external event determined the direction which this outburst of the
spirit of freedom should take. This was the contact of the modern with
the ancient mind, which followed upon what is called the Revival of
Learning. The fall of the Greek empire in 1453, while it signalized the
extinction of the old order, gave an impulse to the now accumulated
forces of the new. A belief in the identity of the human spirit under
all manifest