its rough walls have been polished by the kisses of pilgrims, and hung with pious offerings. Lamps burn continually therein as if it were a shrine.
Back of the Porziuncula is the low, dark cell St. Francis inhabited, and where he ended his days. It was here, while he was dying, two of the friars sang his Hymn of the Sun, which breathes so fully his love for everything created. And when they ceased, he himself took up the strain, to sing the sweetness of death, which he called his “sister, terrible and beautiful,” in the spirit of Job, who said to corruption: Thou art my father; to the worm: Thou art my mother and my sister.
Then we were taken into the recess where St. Francis so often chastised his body, which he regarded as his beast of burden that it behoved him to beat daily and to lead around with a halter. When dying, he is said to have begged pardon of this old companion of the way for inflicting so many stripes on it for the good of his soul. There is also the Cappella delle Rose with the Spineto—a little court once filled with coarse brambles, but now aflush with roses. Here St. Francis, being tempted to renounce a life in which he was consumed with watchings and prayers, for his only reply threw himself among the thorns, which, tinged with his blood, were immediately changed into roses. They bloom here still, but without thorns, and their petals are stained as with blood. If transplanted elsewhere, the stains are said to fade away and the thorns to come forth again. It was twelve of these roses, six red and six white, the saint bore with him into the Porziuncula when the great Perdono of the 2d of August was granted—roses
that for ever will embalm the church, and that have been immortalized by artists all over Italy and Spain.
The immense convent of Observantine friars adjoining is now solitary and desolate. The Italian government has turned the inmates out of this cradle of their order, with the exception of two or three, who are left as guardians of the church. The hundreds of poor, once fed at their gates in time of need, now take revenge on the passing traveller, and fasten themselves on him with pertinacious grasp. But who can refuse a dole where St. Francis has made Poverty for ever glorious?
From St. Mary of the Angels we went winding up the hill to Assisi. Its base is clothed with the olive, the vine, and the fig, but its sides are as nude and destitute as the Bride of St. Francis. Above, on the right, rises the tall campanile of Santa Chiara over the tomb of St. Clare. At the left is the fortress-like edifice of the Sagro Convento on the Hill of Paradise, once known as the Colle d’Inferno, where St. Francis desired to be buried among malefactors. This monastery against the mountain side stands on a long line of double arches that seem hewn out of the very cliff. It is one of the most imposing and most interesting monuments in Italy, and astonishes the eye by its bold, massive, and picturesque appearance, quite in harmony with the old mediæval city. It has been called the Sagro Convento ever since its consecration by Pope Innocent IV. in 1243—the Sacred Convent, par excellence. Santa Chiara and this convent of St. Francis seem like two strongholds at the extremities of the town to protect it from danger. Between them it rises in terraces, crowned
by a ruined old citadel of feudal times. The declining sun lighted up its domes, and towers, and venerable gray walls as we ascended, and made it seem to our enraptured eyes a seraphic city indeed.
Half way up the hill we came to the Spedalicchio—the ancient ’Spital where St. Francis so often came to take care of the lepers. It was here, as he was borne on a litter to the Porziuncula by the friars, a few days before his death, he begged them to stop and turn him around, not to take a last look at the city he loved—for the eyes that had wept so many tears were now blind—but to bless it with uplifted hands, in solemn, tender words that have been graven over one of the gates:
Benedicta tu civitas a Domino, quia per te multæ animæ salvabuntur, et in te multi servi Altissimi habitabunt, et de te multi eligentur ad regnum æternum.—A city blessed of the Lord art thou, because by thee many souls shall be saved, and in thee shall dwell many servants of the Most High, and from thee many shall be chosen to reign for ever and ever!
With what emotion one enters its gates!… We drove through old, narrow, ascending streets, silent and monastic, named after the saints; past old rock-built houses of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with the holy names of Jesus and Mary over nearly every door; flower-pots with pinks and gillyflowers in all the windows, even the poorest, or on ledges, or set in rings projecting from the walls; and women spinning under the old archways like St. Clare, who, we are told, even when wasted and enfeebled by her austerities, sat up in bed and span linen of marvellous fineness.