Into this blessed company no earthly pain could
enter to destroy their delights. Cold and hunger and the dagger's point
could never find them more, nor sickness rack them, nor betrayal set
their blood in a poisoned flame, nor earthquakes chill them with
terror. Lying in that heavenly sunshine, with fruit-laden boughs within
reach and heaps of gold beside them if they should wish for it, they
could laugh at Vesuvius licking in vain with its fiery tongue toward
them, and at the black clouds heavy with hail that would spread ruin
over the fields far away from these celestial vineyards and the waving
grain of Paradise.
Exalted by such visions, what to them were the gazing crowd and their
own rags and squalor? They entered the Porziuncola singing: they came
out at the side-door transfigured, and silent except for some
breathless "Maria!" or "Gesu!" Their arms were thrown upward, their
glowing black eyes were upraised, their thin swarthy faces burned with
a vivid scarlet, their white teeth glittered between the parted lips.
Round and round they went like a great water-wheel that revolves in sun
and shadow, and the spray it tossed up as it issued from the
Porziuncola was rapture, the fiery spray of the soul.
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