ASSISI.
“St. Francis be my speed!”
Think of being taken into Umbria, preternatural Umbria, where every olive-sandalled mountain is full of mysterious influences, and every leaf and flower of the smiling valleys seem to breathe out some sweet old Franciscan legend, by a steam-engine bearing the name of Fulton! It was hard. Not but we have the highest respect for—nay, a certain pride in—that great inventor; still it seemed a positive grievance to find anything modern in what was to us a world of poetry and mediæval tradition. We wished, if not to gird ourselves humbly with the cord like Dante, at least to put ourselves in harmony with one of the most delicious regions in the world, where at every step the lover of the classic, of art, or of the higher mystic lore finds so much to suit his turn. The name of Fulton sounds well along the Hudson, but to hear the shriek of an engine awaken the echoes of the Apennines, and see it go plunging insensibly through the very heart of poetical Umbria, along the shores of “reedy Thrasimene,” through “the defiles fatal to Roman rashness,” was a blow difficult to recover from. It required the overpowering influences of this enchanting region, as every one will believe, to restore our equanimity.
Umbria is a mountainous region of the Ecclesiastical States that gradually ascends from the Tiber toward the Apennines, now called the Duchy of Spoleto. It is full of sweet, sunny valleys enclosed
among majestic mountains, with a range of temperature that produces great variety of vegetation, from the pine and the oak to the orange and aloe, the olive and the vine. Its cliffs are crowned with sanctuaries which are resonant night and day with prayer and psalmody, or old towns, each with the remembrance of some saint whose shrine it guards with jealous care, or some artist or poet whose works have made it renowned, or some venerable classical recollection that clings to it like the vine which gives so much grace and freshness to the landscape. There is Spoleto, whose gates closed against Hannibal; Arezzo, where Petrarch was born; Cortona, with its “diadem of towers” and its legend of St. Margaret; Perugia dolente, which Totila only took after a seven years’ siege, and which Charlemagne placed under the sweet yoke of the Papacy; Montefalco, like a falcon’s nest on the crest of the mountain, famous for its virgin saint and its frescos of Benozzo Gozzoli; and picturesque Marni, where the Blessed Lucy when a child played with the Christorello. We pass Orvieto, with its wonderful proofs of past cultivation; the lake of Bolsena, with its isle where a queen died of hunger, and its shores verdant with the glorious pines sung by Virgil, at the foot of which Leo X., when a guest at the Farnese villa, used to gather around him the artists and poets of the day, to indulge in intellectual converse till “the azure
gloom of an Italian night” gathered around them with hues that spoke of heaven.
But over all hovers especially the grand memory of St. Francis, with which the whole of this beautiful region is embalmed. Along its valleys and mountain paths he used to go with Fra Pacifico, the poet laureate of Frederick II., singing their hymns of praise, calling themselves God’s minstrels, who desired no other reward from those who gathered around them but the sincere repentance of their sins. There is the lake of Perugia, where he spent forty days alone on an island among the sad olives, fasting in imitation of our Saviour, in continual communion with God and the angels—a spot now marked by a convent whose foundations are washed by the waters of the lake. There is the blue lake of Rieti, to which, in his compassion for God’s creatures, he restored the fish alive, with the four Franciscan convents on the hills that enclose it. There is Gubbio, with the legend of the fierce wolf he tamed, to which the people erected a statue—an unquestionable proof of its truth. There is the
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