In Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio Italy recovered the consciousness of intellectual liberty.  What we call the Renaissance had not yet arrived; but their achievement rendered its appearance in due season certain.  With Dante the genius of the modern world dared to stand alone and to create confidently after its own fashion.  With Petrarch the same genius reached forth across the gulf of darkness, resuming the tradition of a splendid past.  With Boccaccio the same genius proclaimed the beauty of the world, the goodliness of youth and strength and love and life, unterrified by hell, unappalled by the shadow of impending death.

It was now, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Italy had lost indeed the heroic spirit which we admire in her Communes of the thirteenth, but had gained instead ease, wealth, magnificence, and that repose which springs from long prosperity, that the new age at last began.  Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried the civilization of the old world.  Behind stretched the centuries of mediaevalism, intellectually barren and inert.  Of the future there were as yet but faint foreshadowings.  Meanwhile, the force of the nations who were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted; their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired.  No ages of enervating luxury, of intellectual endeavor, of life artificially preserved or ingeniously prolonged, had sapped the fiber of the men who were about to inaugurate the modern world.  Severely nurtured, unused to delicate living, these giants of the Renaissance were like boys in their capacity for endurance, their inordinate appetite for enjoyment.  No generations, hungry, sickly, effete, critical, disillusioned, trod them down.  Ennui and the fatigue that springs from skepticism, the despair of thwarted effort, were unknown.  Their fresh and unperverted senses rendered them keenly alive to what was beautiful and natural.  They yearned for magnificence, and instinctively comprehended splendor.  At the same time the period of satiety was still far off.  Everything seemed possible to their young energy; nor had a single pleasure palled upon their appetite.  Born, as it were, at the moment when desires and faculties are evenly balanced, when the perceptions are not blunted nor the senses cloyed, opening their eyes for the first time on a world of wonder, these men of the Renaissance enjoyed what we may term the first transcendent springtide of the modern world.  Nothing is more remarkable than the fullness of the life that throbbed in them.  Natures rich in all capacities and endowed with every kind of sensibility were frequent.  Nor was there any limit to the play of personality in action.  We may apply to them what Mr. Browning has written of Sordello’s temperament:—­

                A footfall there
  Suffices to upturn to the warm air
  Half germinating spices, mere decay
  Produces richer life, and day by day
  New pollen on the lily-petal grows,
  And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.