"Praise the Lord!" the royal Psalmist had sung, "praise the Lord, fire and frost, snow and mists, stormy winds that do his will, mountains and all hills, fruit-trees and all cedars, beasts and all cattle, creeping things and fowls with wings, kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all judges of the earth, young men and maidens, old men and children, praise the Lord, praise ye the Lord!" The day of the birds of Bevagna remained in his memory as one of the most beautiful of his whole life, and though usually so reserved he always loved to tell of it;[18] it was because he owed to Clara these pure ardors which brought him into a secret and delicious communion with all beings; it was she who had revived him from sadness and hesitation; in his heart he bore an immense gratitude to her who, just when he needed it, had known how to return to him love for love, inspiration for inspiration.
Francis's sympathy for animals, as we see it shining forth here, has none of that sentimentalism, so often artificial and exclusive of all other love, which certain associations of his time noisily displayed; in him it is only a manifestation of his feeling for nature, a deeply mystical, one might say pantheistic, sentiment, if the word had not a too definitely philosophical sense, quite opposite to the Franciscan thought.
This sentiment, which in the poets of the thirteenth century is so often false and affected, was in him not only true, but had in it something alive, healthy, robust.[19] It is this vein of poetry which awoke Italy to self-consciousness, made her in a few years forget the nightmare of Catharist ideas, and rescued her from pessimism.

By it Francis became the forerunner of the artistic movement which preceded the Renaissance, the inspirer of that group of Pre-Raphaelites, awkward, grotesque in drawing though at times they were, to whom we turn to-day with a sort of piety, finding in their ungraceful saints an inner life, a moral feeling which we seek for elsewhere in vain.
If the voice of the Poverello of Assisi was so well understood it was because in this matter, as in all others, it was entirely unconventional.

How far we are, with him, from the fierce or Pharisaic piety of those monks which forbids even the females of animals to enter their convent! His notion of chastity in no sense resembles this excessive prudery.

One day at Sienna he asked for some turtle-doves, and holding them in the skirt of his tunic, he said: "Little sisters turtle-doves, you are simple, innocent, and chaste; why did you let yourselves be caught?
I shall save you from death, and have nests made for you, so that you may bring forth young and multiply according to the commandment of our Creator." And he went and made nests for them all, and the turtle-doves began to lay eggs and bring up their broods under the eyes of the Brothers.[20] At Rieti a family of red-breasts were the guests of the monastery, and the young birds made marauding expeditions on the very table where the Brothers were eating.[21] Not far from there, at Greccio,[22] they brought to Francis a leveret that had been taken alive in a trap.

"Come to me, brother leveret," he said to it.