EASTER MORNING AT ASSISI

We are in the lower church of S. Francesco.  High mass is being sung, with orchestra and organ and a choir of many voices.  Candles are lighted on the altar, over-canopied with Giotto’s allegories.  From the low southern windows slants the sun, in narrow bands, upon the many-coloured gloom and embrowned glory of these painted aisles.  Women in bright kerchiefs kneel upon the stones, and shaggy men from the mountains stand or lean against the wooden benches.  There is no moving from point to point.  Where we have taken our station, at the north-western angle of the transept, there we stay till mass be over.  The whole low-vaulted building glows duskily; the frescoed roof, the stained windows, the figure-crowded pavements blending their rich but subdued colours, like hues upon some marvellous moth’s wings, or like a deep-toned rainbow mist discerned in twilight dreams, or like such tapestry as Eastern queens, in ancient days, wrought for the pavilion of an empress.  Forth from this maze of mingling tints, indefinite in shade and sunbeams, lean earnest, saintly faces—­ineffably pure—­adoring, pitying, pleading; raising their eyes in ecstasy to heaven, or turning them in ruth toward earth.  Men and women of whom the world was not worthy—­at the hands of those old painters they have received the divine grace, the dovelike simplicity, whereof Italians in the fourteenth century possessed the irrecoverable secret.  Each face is a poem; the counterpart in painting to a chapter from the Fioretti di San Francesco.  Over the whole scene—­in the architecture, in the frescoes, in the coloured windows, in the gloom, on the people, in the incense, from the chiming bells, through the music—­broods one spirit:  the spirit of him who was ’the co-espoused, co-transforate with Christ;’ the ardent, the radiant, the beautiful in soul; the suffering, the strong, the simple, the victorious over self and sin; the celestial who trampled upon earth and rose on wings of ecstasy to heaven; the Christ-inebriated saint of visions supersensual and life beyond the grave.  Far down below the feet of those who worship God through him, S. Francis sleeps; but his soul, the incorruptible part of him, the message he gave the world, is in the spaces round us.  This is his temple.  He fills it like an unseen god.  Not as Phoebus or Athene, from their marble pedestals; but as an abiding spirit, felt everywhere, nowhere seized, absorbing in itself all mysteries, all myths, all burning exaltations, all abasements, all love, self-sacrifice, pain, yearning, which the thought of Christ, sweeping the centuries, hath wrought for men.  Let, therefore, choir and congregation raise their voices on the tide of prayers and praises; for this is Easter morning—­Christ is risen!  Our sister, Death of the Body, for whom S. Francis thanked God in his hymn, is reconciled to us this day, and takes us by the hand, and leads us to the gate whence floods of heavenly glory issue from the faces of a multitude of saints.  Pray, ye poor people; chant and pray.  If all be but a dream, to wake from this were loss for you indeed!