Although he lived on bread himself, and poverty was his chosen lady, he regarded the asceticism of the early Middle Ages as futile and rejected it.  The fire of life burned in him so ardently that he gave no thought to the morrow, and literally followed the admonition of the Gospels:  “So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be My disciple.”  We read in the Fioretti (perhaps the oldest popular collection of poems in existence) that he expressly prohibited asceticism as a principle; an idea too foreign to the spirit of the age to have been an invention.  He also disapproved of the secluded monastic life, then the universal ideal of the vita contemplativa, and insisted on his followers living in the world, radiating love and sustaining life by the charity of their fellow-men.

There is an anecdote contained in the Fioretti, reflecting the great superiority and lucidity of his mind.  On a cold winter’s day he and Brother Leo were tramping through the deep snow.  “Brother Leo,” said St. Francis, “if we could restore sight to all blind men, heal all cripples, expel evil spirits and recall the dead to life—­it would not be perfect joy.”  And after a while:  “And if we knew all the secrets of science, the course of the stars, the ways of the beasts—­it would not be perfect joy—­and if by our preaching we could convert all infidels to the true faith—­even that would not be perfect joy.”  “Tell me then, Father,” said Brother Leo, “what would be perfect joy?” “If we now knocked at the convent gates, cold and wet and faint with hunger, and the porter sent us away with harsh words, so that we should have to stand in the snow until the evening; if we thus waited, bearing all things patiently without murmuring—­that would be perfect joy:  the mercy of self-control.”

“He met death singing,” says his biographer, Thomas of Celano, the author of the magnificent Dies irae, dies illa.  On his deathbed St. Francis composed and sang without interruption the Hymn to the Sun, that lofty song of praise in which the sum total of his noble life, love for all created things,—­is comprised and transfigured.  It expresses a new form of devotion, composed of the ecstasy of love and perfect humility.  He embraced in his heart his brother Sun, his sister Moon, the dear Stars; his brother Wind, his sister and mother Earth; and on the day of his death this brother seraphicus added to it a powerful and touching song of praise of his “brother Death.”  The legend has it that a flock of singing-birds descended on the roof of the cottage in which he lay dying; the songs of his “little sisters” accompanied him to the world beyond the grave.

We are justified in comparing this death, which was sustained by the fundamental forces of that era, soul and emotion, to that other, more famous, death of antiquity.  Socrates died without in the least succumbing to any personal feeling, supported by the purely logical consideration that it was expedient to obey the laws of the State.  His death was the application of a universal proposition to an individual case, and because no one could accuse Socrates of a dialectical error, the conclusion, his death, had to take place.