Every holy spot, almost, is marked by a chapel, wherein man’s handiwork obscures—and dare we say mars?—while it exalts, the memories of the past. It is all so unlike what Saint Francis saw when he rode up on his donkey from the other side to take possession of Orlando’s gift of the ‘divoto monte.’ Yet one cannot stand without emotion before the commonplace chapel that marks the spot where the little birds came to welcome him: “con cantare e con battere l’ ali,” making “grandissima festa e allegrezza,” settling on his head and shoulders and arms and in his bosom.[364] And when one has entered the portal, one is fain to see not only the Chapel of the Stigmata, with the very spot marked out for honour where in 1221 the Saint—
Da Cristo preso l’ ultimo sigillo
Che le sue membra due anni portarno,[365]
and the “sasso spicco”—that weird rent in the rocks concerning which Saint Francis believed himself to have divine revelation, that it was the result of the earthquake at the crucifixion: “quando, secondo che dice il Vangelista, le pietre si spezzarono.”[366] This, too, is an inevitable object of the Dantist’s pilgrimage, for he regards it as extremely probable that the idea of the cloven rocks in the twelfth of Inferno[367] came to Dante from La Verna and Franciscan lore. But there are other spots untouched by Dante, yet hallowed by memories of the “poverello di Cristo.” Such is the hollow grembo in the cliff-side where the rock received the Saint into her maternal bosom, yielding “like molten wax” to the impress of his form,[368] when the fiend would have hurled him down the precipice. Such, again, is the grotto where his hermit-bed is shewn,[369] wherein he passed the first Lent of his sojourn at La Verna; and such, too, is the stone, self-consecrate, and so used without further benediction as an altar top, whereon, so legend says, the Redeemer often-times stood and conversed familiarly with his poor servant “face to face as a man speaketh unto his friend.”[370]
Dante rests under the shadow of Saint Francis—not at La Verna, indeed, but at Ravenna. The Campanile of the Franciscan church stands sentry over his tomb. It is known that he was buried in the Franciscan habit: and it has been justly conjectured that his association with the Order was no mere thing of sentiment. One of the earliest commentators on the Divina Commedia[371] asserts that for a time he actually joined the Order, to whose girdle of cord he seems to refer,[372] as worn formerly by him as a safeguard against youthful lusts—
Io avea una corda intorno cinta
E con essa pensai alcuna volta
Prender la lonza a la pelle dipinta.
And a living Dantist has recently put forth the suggestion that this connection with the Franciscans began with his boyish studies. Between his ninth and his eighteenth year, when, according to the Vita Nuova, a something unnamed kept him apart from the lady of his heart, he was, so it is thought, living under strict rule, studying as a pupil under the good friars of Santa Croce,[373] and laying the foundations at once of that theological lore which amazes us to-day, and of that lofty ideal of virtue of which he sings—
... già m’ avea trafitto