ciousness of
intellectual liberty. What we call the Renaissance had not yet arrived;
but their achievement rendered its appearance in due season certain.
With Dante the genius of the modern world dared to stand alone and to
create confidently after its own fashion. With Petrarch the same genius
reached forth across the gulf of darkness, resuming the tradition of a
splendid past. With Boccaccio the same genius proclaimed the beauty of
the world, the goodliness of youth and strength and love and life,
unterrified by hell, unappalled by the shadow of impending death.

It was now, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Italy had
lost indeed the heroic spirit which we admire in her Communes of the
thirteenth, but had gained instead ease, wealth, magnificence, and that
repose which springs from long prosperity, that the new age at last
began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried
the civilization of the old world. Behind stretched the centuries of
mediaevalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were
as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who
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