Joyful shall our day go by,
  Purity its dawning light,
  Faith its fervid noontide glow,
  And for us shall be no night!]

The hymn in every word well expressed the character and habitual pose of mind of the singer, whose views of earthly matters were as different from the views of ordinary working mortals as those of a bird, as he flits and perches and sings, must be from those of the four-footed ox who plods.  The “sobriam ebrietatem spiritus” was with him first constitutional, as a child of sunny skies, and then cultivated by every employment and duty of the religious and artistic career to which from childhood he had devoted himself.  If perfect, unalloyed happiness has ever existed in this weary, work-day world of ours, it has been in the bosoms of some of those old religious artists of the Middle Ages, whose thoughts grew and flowered in prayerful shadows, bursting into thousands of quaint and fanciful blossoms on the pages of missal and breviary.  In them the fine life of color, form, and symmetry, which is the gift of the Italian, formed a rich stock on which to graft the true vine of religious faith, and rare and fervid were the blossoms.

For it must be remarked in justice of the Christian religion, that the Italian people never rose to the honors of originality in the beautiful arts till inspired by Christianity.  The Art of ancient Rome was a second-hand copy of the original and airy Greek,—­often clever, but never vivid and self-originating.  It is to the religious Art of the Middle Ages, to the Umbrian and Florentine schools particularly, that we look for the peculiar and characteristic flowering of the Italian mind.  When the old Greek Art revived again in modern Europe, though at first it seemed to add richness and grace to this peculiar development, it smothered and killed it at last, as some brilliant tropical parasite exhausts the life of the tree it seems at first to adorn.  Raphael and Michel Angelo mark both the perfected splendor and the commenced decline of original Italian Art; and just in proportion as their ideas grew less Christian and more Greek did the peculiar vividness and intense flavor of Italian nationality pass away from them.  They became again like the ancient Romans, gigantic imitators and clever copyists, instead of inspired kings and priests of a national development.

The tones of the monk’s morning hymn awakened both Agnes and Elsie, and the latter was on the alert instantly.

“Bless my soul!” she said, “brother Antonio has a marvellous power of lungs; he is at it the first thing in the morning.  It always used to be so; when he was a boy, he would wake me up before daylight, singing.

“He is happy, like the birds,” said Agnes, “because he flies near heaven.”

“Like enough:  he was always a pious boy; his prayers and his pencil were ever uppermost:  but he was a poor hand at work:  he could draw you an olive-tree on paper; but set him to dress it, and any fool would have done better.”