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.