childhood he had devoted himself. If perfect, unalloyed happiness has
ever existed in this weary, work-day world of ours, it has been in the
bosoms of some of those old religious artists of the Middle Ages, whose
thoughts grew and flowered in prayerful shadows, bursting into thousands
of quaint and fanciful blossoms on the pages of missal and breviary. In
them the fine life of color, form, and symmetry, which is the gift of
the Italian, formed a rich stock on which to graft the true vine of
religious faith, and rare and fervid were the blossoms.

For it must be remarked in justice of the Christian religion, that the
Italian people never rose to the honors of originality in the beautiful
arts till inspired by Christianity. The Art of ancient Rome was a
second-hand copy of the original and airy Greek,--often clever, but
never vivid and self-originating. It is to the religious Art of the
Middle Ages, to the Umbrian and Florentine schools particularly, that we
look for the peculiar and characteristic flowering of the Italian mind.
When the old Greek Art revived again in modern Europe, though at first
it seemed to add richness and grace to this peculiar development, it
smothered and killed it at last, as some brilliant tropical parasite
exhausts the life of the tree it seems at first to adorn. Raphael and
Michel Angelo mark both the perfected splendor and the commenced decline
of original Italian Art; and just in proportion as their ideas grew less
Christian and more Greek did the peculiar vividness and intense flavor
of Italian nationality pass away from them. They became again like the
ancient Romans, gigantic imitators and clever copyists, instead of
inspired kings and priests of a national development.

The tones of the monk's morning hymn awakened both Agnes and Elsie, and
the latter was on the alert instantly.