A Man who seven hundred years ago lived from the age of twenty-five to that of forty-five a life of extreme self-discipline, and who yet preached of love and joy with a Doric simplicity, has captured the imagination of the modern world, as he did that of his contemporaries, and been found so faultless and so fascinating that both those who are scholars and those who are not keep on bringing out new books, as we see once more. His joy and his love of nature, which made him hail the water and the moon and death as his sisters, and the sun and the wind and fire as his brothers, call even to the present age with a sweet secret voice, and there is in holiness itself a romance which stirs the heart of the most earthly of us. But otherwise it would be hard to explain the popularity of St. Francis of Assisi, or to tell why so many people share enthusiasm with the Catholic pilgrims who are now crowding the Umbrian town which, seen from Perugia, looks like a pale patch upon a purple hill, why, in every country, many ordinary people are thinking of that scene of 1226 when the worn-out body, poor ill-treated Brother Ass, refused to go any further, and marked strangely in hands and feet and side, as though a copy of the Crucified, it grew finally still in the twilight of an October evening in a thatched cell on the plain beneath the little town, while, according to St. Bonaventura, innumerable larks, with full throats, alighted on the thatch, singing the songs of dawn at nightfall.