Father Antonio felt his soul deeply stirred with the news of the excommunication of his saintly master; and he marvelled, as he tossed on his restless bed through the night, how he was to meet the storm.  He might have known, had he been able to look into a crowded assembly in Florence about this time, when the unterrified monk thus met the news of his excommunication:—­

“There have come decrees from Rome, have there?  They call me a son of perdition.  Well, thus may you answer:—­He to whom you give this name hath neither favorites nor concubines, but gives himself solely to preaching Christ.  His spiritual sons and daughters, those who listen to his doctrine, do not pass their time in infamous practices.  They confess, they receive the communion, they live honestly.  This man gives himself up to exalt the Church of Christ:  you to destroy it.  The time approaches for opening the secret chamber:  we will give but one turn of the key, and there will come out thence such an infection, such a stench of this city of Rome, that the odor shall spread through all Christendom, and all the world shall be sickened.”

But Father Antonio was of himself wholly unable to come to such a courageous result, though capable of following to the death the master who should do it for him.  His was the true artist nature, as unfit to deal with rough human forces as a bird that flies through the air is unfitted to a hand-to-hand grapple with the armed forces of the lower world.  There is strength in these artist natures.  Curious computations have been made of the immense muscular power that is brought into exercise when a swallow skims so smoothly through the blue sky; but the strength is of a kind unadapted to mundane uses, and needs the ether for its display.  Father Antonio could create the beautiful; he could warm, could elevate, could comfort; and when a stronger nature went before him, he could follow with an unquestioning tenderness of devotion:  but he wanted the sharp, downright power of mind that could cut and cleave its way through the rubbish of the past, when its institutions, instead of a commodious dwelling, had come to be a loathsome prison.  Besides, the true artist has ever an enchanted island of his own; and when this world perplexes and wearies him, he can sail far away and lay his soul down to rest, as Cytherea bore the sleeping Ascanius far from the din of battle, to sleep on flowers and breathe the odor of a hundred undying altars to Beauty.

Therefore, after a restless night, the good monk arose in the first purple of the dawn, and instinctively betook him to a review of his drawings for the shrine, as a refuge from troubled thought.  He took his sketch of the Madonna and Child into the morning twilight and began meditating thereon, while the clouds that lined the horizon were glowing rosy purple and violet with the approaching day.

“See there!” he said to himself, “yonder clouds have exactly the rosy purple of the cyclamen which my little Agnes loves so much;—­yes, I am resolved that this cloud on which our Mother standeth shall be of a cyclamen color.  And there is that star, like as it looked yesterday evening, when I mused upon it.  Methought I could see our Lady’s clear brow, and the radiance of her face, and I prayed that some little power might be given to show forth that which transports me.”