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.