tretching heavily across pillars which
look like stunted giants, so short are they and so tremendously
thick-set, the high altar enclosed by an elaborate grating, the little
side-chapels like so many black cells, and through the gloom a twinkle
and glimmer of gold and color and motes floating in furtive sunbeams
that had strayed in through the superb stained glass of the infrequent
windows. The frescoes of Giotto and his school enrich every spandril
and interspace with their simple, serious forms--no other such place
to study the art of that early day--but a Virgin enthroned among
saints by Lo Spagna, a disciple of Perugino's, made a pure light in
the obscurity: it had all the master's golden transparency, like clear
shining after the rain. From this most solemn and venerable place we
went down to the lowest church, the real sepulchre: it was darker than
the one we had left, totally dark it seemed to me, and contracted,
although--it is in the form of a Greek cross--each arm is sixty feet:
in fact, it is only a crypt of unusual size; and although here
were the saint's bones in an urn of bronze, we were conscious of a
weakening of the impression made by the place we had just left. No
doubt it is because the crypt is of this century, while the other two
churches are of the thirteenth.

There are other things to be seen at Assisi; and after dining at the
little Albergo del Leone, which, like every part of the town except
the churches, is remarkably clean, my companion set out to climb up to
the castle, and I wandered back to the great church. As I sat idly
on the steps a monk accosted me, and finding that I had not seen the
convent, carried me through labyrinthine corridors and galleries, down
long flights of subterranean stone steps, one after another, until
I thought we could not be far from the centre of the earth, when he
suddenly turned aside into a vast cloister with high arched openings
and led me to one of them. Oh, the beauty, the glory, the wonder of
the sight! We were halfway down the mountain-side, hanging between the
blue heaven and the billowy Umbrian plain, with its verdure and its
azure fusing into tints of dreamy softness as they vanished in the
deep violet shadows of thick-crowding mountains, on whose surfaces
and gorges lay changing colors of the superbest intensity. Poplars and
willows showed silvery among the tender green of other deciduous trees
in their fresh spring foliage and the deep velvet of the