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It was not so much to save the souls of men from hell, about which, indeed, there is comparatively little talk in the Fioretti, but to draw them also into the mystic circle where such angelic music was heard, that Francis of Assisi preached throughout Umbria, and even as far as the Soldan's country; and, if we interpret it rightly, the strings of that heavenly viol were the works of creation and the souls of all creatures, and the bow, whose upward movement ravished, and whose downward movement would have almost annihilated with its sweetness, that bow drawn across the vibrating world was no other than love.
Louis loved the Franciscans, and in the Fioretti a beautiful story is told how the king, in the guise of a pilgrim, visiting Brother Giles at Perugia, knelt with the good friar in an embrace of fervent affection for a great space of time in silence. See L'affaire du Collier, by M. Funck Brentano. The establishment of the abbeys of St.
Men and women of whom the world was not worthy at the hands of those old painters they have received the divine grace, the dove-like simplicity, whereof Italians in the fourteenth century possessed the irrecoverable secret. Each face is a poem; the counterpart in painting to a chapter from the Fioretti di San Francesco.
Can it have been this "pious brother" who wrote the Fioretti? Everywhere you go in La Verna you feel that S. Francesco has been before you; and where there is no tradition to help you, surely you will make one for yourself. Can he who loved everything that had life have failed to love, too, that world he saw from La Penna "Nel crudo sasso, intra Tevere ed Amo"
The "Fioretti di San Francisco" is a handbook of polite friendliness to men, women, birds, wolves, and, what must have been most difficult, fellow-monks; and St. Francis' Hymn to the Sun might be given as an example of the wise man's courtship of what we stupidly call inanimates.
We ascend slowly under the burning sun, and suddenly, at the end of a court surrounded by slender columns, enter within the obscurity of the cathedral. It is unequalled; before having seen it one has no idea of the art and the genius of the Middle Ages. Append to it Dante and the "Fioretti" of St. Francis, and it becomes the masterpiece of mystic Christianity.
Fioretti xxviii. "... Questo dono, che era dato a frate Bernardo da Quintevalle, cioè, che volando si pascesse come la rondine." Indeed, we can judge of what the Franciscan movement was to the world by what its gospel, the divine Fioretti, are even to ourselves.
He informed me it was because of a very edifying little miracle, which for all its charm had unfortunately never found a place in the collection of the Fioretti.
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