The more beautiful is the dawn, the less one can describe it.

The most beautiful things in nature, the flower and the butterfly, should be touched only by delicate hands.
The effort here made to indicate the variegated, wavering tints which form the atmosphere in which St.Francis lived is therefore of very uncertain success.

It was perhaps presumptuous to undertake it.
Happily we are no longer in the time when historians thought they had done the right thing when they had reduced everything to its proper size, contenting themselves with denying or omitting everything in the life of the heroes of humanity which rises above the level of our every-day experience.
No doubt Francis did not meet on the road to Sienna three pure and gentle virgins come from heaven to greet him; the devil did not overturn rocks for the sake of terrifying him; but when we deny these visions and apparitions, we are victims of an error graver, perhaps, than that of those who affirm them.
The first time that I was at Assisi I arrived in the middle of the night.

When the sun rose, flooding everything with warmth and light, the old basilica[11] seemed suddenly to quiver; one might have said that it wished to speak and sing.

Giotto's frescos, but now invisible, awoke to a strange life, you might have thought them painted the evening before so much alive they were; everything was moving without awkwardness or jar.
I returned six months later.