St. Paul daily globe. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn.) 1884-1896, 1894-01-14

acteriStic vices Of the age, and who
voices its onward march. Though Ten
nySon was an aristocrat, he was not
afraid to curse the social forms which
err from the honest rule of nature, nor
to damn the gold that gild's the fools
straight forehead; nor to praise that
virtue which has for its object the bet
terment of all men. A humane society
could make good use of the following
line taken from ''Locksley Hall Sixty
Years After"
'Brutes, the brutes, are not your wrongers-
burned at midnight, found at morn,
Twisted hard i'll mortal agony with their Off
spring, born, unborn,
Clinging to the silent motherl Are we
devils? Are we men?
Sweet Ut. Francis OF ASSIST would that he
were here again,
He that in his Catholic Wilderness used to call
Sisters, brothers-and the beasts-whose
pains are hardly less than ours.''
THE LEGEND.
To me it is perfectly Ineligible how
so many legends bave come to be woven
| into the lives Of the saints These le-
gends are perfectly harmless. They
may be even useful in the way of devel-
oping the imaginative faculty. The
story of the tEornless rose of Assist is
as innocent and as interesting as the
fiction about Santa Claus bringing gifts
to children at Christmas. AS a rule,
pious people do not pause to question
anecdotes told of saints, although such
stories may be inherently absurd.
Mo g
dull, dreary January night in the
year 1884, dull and dreary even in sunny
Umbria, Francis sat alone in his cold
cell at Assist. The thought came to him
that perhaps after all he had better
| abandon his austere life and return to
the ways of the world. Instead of
yielding to the temptation he rushed
from his cell and ran out into the gar
den, where grew rosebush which had
the long, sharp thorns of these shrubs.
Francis rolled himself in the thorns UNI
til blood issued from every pore.
When he arose, the legend tells US
that he was covered with garment of
the purest white and that instead of the
thorny shrub there blooE:ed thornless
| rose tree covered with roses white and
red. That the thornless rose tree grows
in the garden of Assist l am certain,
and still retain one of its roses as
souvenir. But the love-laden valley
| near Assist is of such beauty that one
can easily conceive the growth of thorn
less rose trees there even without the
interposition of preternatural power.
HIS POETRY.
In the soul of francesca there were
| tragic elements; in his makeup there
was an intense poetic temperament. 1t
is not generally known that this deep
| lover of nature and its God actually
wrote poetry. In fact he was the first
poet who wrote i'll Italian. Hitherto
| the bastard Latin of the common people
! had found no poetic exponent. Were
we to apply our modern straight-laced
| standards to the verses of Francis the
| simple imagery might still remain, but
! his etfuSionS could scarcely be brought
under the technical head of poetry. At
! the same time his words are hardly
more artless and his rhythm not more
| irregular than those Of Walt Whitman,
But we can honestly give him unquali-
| fed praise for the divine spirit of I'M
! limited sympathy shown in his poems.
Mrs. Oliphant does not eXaggerate when
| she calls him the friend OF everything
| that suffered and rejoiced." 1t was a
! spirit of religious chivalry which drew
| this Christian knight to redress wrongs
and to succor the afflicted. A spiritual
son of st. Francis helped Columbus to
win over Isabella of Castillo; his spirit
ual children were the first to introduce
a unique and interesting civilization
along the Pacific coast. They have left
to US legacy in the ''old MISSIONS of
the West, those historical monuments
! I0lN Cl-n 4
poetic appeal to the highest nature of
men. And If people so widely apart as
Dante and Tennysoh, and Lott and
| Ouida and Mrs. Oliphant can turn aside
from their varied vocations to pay their
respects to the founder of the Francis
cans, Americans upon whom he has
some historical claim may we'll give
the tribute of passing thought to the
seraph of Assist.