modern science, and proclaimed that man, by use of nature, can do all things.  Joachim of Flora, intermediate between the two, drank one drop of the cup of prophecy offered to his lips, and cried that ’the Gospel of the Father was past, the Gospel of the Son was passing, the Gospel of the Spirit was to be.’  These three men, each in his own way, the Frenchman as a logician, the Englishman as an analyst, the Italian as a mystic, divined the future but inevitable emancipation of the reason of mankind.  Nor were there wanting signs, especially in Provence, that Aphrodite and Phoebus and the Graces were ready to resume their sway.  The premature civilization of that favored region, so cruelly extinguished by the Church, was itself a reaction of nature against the restrictions imposed by ecclesiastical discipline; while the songs of the wandering students, known under the title of Carmina Burana, indicate a revival of Pagan or pre-Christian feeling in the very stronghold of mediaeval learning.  We have, moreover, to remember the Cathari, the Paterini, the Fraticelli, the Albigenses, the Hussites—­heretics in whom the new light dimly shone, but who were instantly exterminated by the Church.  We have to commemorate the vast conception of the Emperor Frederick ii., who strove to found a new society of humane culture in the South of Europe, and to anticipate the advent of the spirit of modern tolerance.  He, too, and all his race were exterminated by the Papal jealousy.  Truly we may say with Michelet that the Sibyl of the Renaissance kept offering her books in vain to feudal Europe.  In vain because the time was not yet.  The ideas projected thus early on the modern world were immature and abortive, like those headless trunks and zoophitic members of half-molded humanity which, in the vision of Empedocles, preceded the birth of full-formed man.  The nations were not ready.  Franciscans imprisoning Roger Bacon for venturing to examine what God had meant to keep secret; Dominicans preaching crusades against the cultivated nobles of Toulouse; Popes stamping out the seed of enlightened Frederick; Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical literature to make way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal:  these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe.  Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance were fragmentary and sterile.

Then came a second period.  Dante’s poem, a work of conscious art, conceived in a modern spirit and written in a modern tongue, was the first true sign that Italy, the leader of the nations of the West, had shaken off her sleep.  Petrarch followed.  His ideal, of antique culture as the everlasting solace and the universal education of the human race, his lifelong effort to recover the classical harmony of thought and speech, gave a direct impulse to one of the chief movements of the Renaissance—­its passionate outgoing toward the ancient world.  After Petrarch, Boccaccio opened yet another channel for the stream of freedom.  His conception of human existence as joy to be accepted with thanksgiving, not as a gloomy error to be rectified by suffering, familiarized the fourteenth century with that form of semi-pagan gladness which marked the real Renaissance.