The 'yonge squire' too, of 'twenty yere of age':—
| Embrouded was he, as it were a mede |
| All full of fresshe floures, white and red. |
| Singing he was, or floyting all the day. |
| He was as fresshe as is the moneth of May. |
In his most delicate descriptions one feels the presence as of a breaking light, and the birds seem forever to sing in his green coverts.
It is the dawn and early morning of the year not less which is dear to him—and which he has chosen, perhaps by an election not wholly his own, as the season in which to order and assemble his famous pilgrimage.
| When that Aprille with his schowres swoote |
| The drought of Marche hath pierced to the roote |
| . . . . . . . . . . |
| Then longen folke to gon on pilgrimages. |
And so, out into the dawn of the year they go, making an immortal morning of it.
IV
Two more lives suggest themselves as especially rich in the testimony they bring of haunting influences which permanently moulded them—those of Keats and Rossetti.
It is well known how completely the early life of Rossetti came under the influence of the Florence of the Middle Ages, and how from the very beginning there fell athwart his life and across his very name the shadow of her greatest son. It is doubtful whether we gain as much knowledge of him by a study of the modern times in which he lived, as by turning our attention to the history and ideals of the Florence of the time of Dante and Lorenzo de' Medici.
'It has been said,' writes Pater, 'that all the great Florentines were preoccupied with death. Outre-tombe! Outre-tombe! is the burden of their thoughts, from Dante to Savonarola. Even the gay and licentious Boccaccio gives a keener edge to his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of people who had taken refuge from the danger of death by plague, in a country house. It was to this inherited sentiment, this practical decision that to be preoccupied with the thought of death was in itself dignifying and a note of high quality, that the seriousness of the great Florentines of the fifteenth century was partly due; and it was reinforced in them by the actual sorrows of their times.'