Giunge la morte plena de egualeza, Sole ve voglio e non vostra richeza. Digna mi son de portar corona, E che signoresi ogni persona.
The _Danse Macabre_ itself is a subject which is well nigh exhaustless. The secret of its immense popularity can be read in the lines just quoted: it proclaimed equality. "Nous mourrons tous," said the French preacher--then, catching the eye of the king, he politely substituted "_presque_ tous." Now there is no "presque" in the Dance of Death. Whether painted by Holbein's brush, or by that of any humble artist of the Italian valleys, the moral is the same: grand lady and milkmaid, monarch and herdsman, all have to go. Who shall fathom the grim comfort there was in this vivid, this highly intelligible showing forth of the indisputable fact? It was a foretaste of the declaration of the rights of man. Professor Pellegrini, who has added an instructive monograph to the literature of the _Danse Macabre_, mentions that on the way to the cemetery of Galliate a wall bears the guiding inscription: "Via al vero comunismo!"
The old custom of way-side ossuaries contributed no doubt towards keeping strongly before the people the symbol and image of the great King. I have often reflected on the effect, certainly if unconsciously felt, of the constant and unveiled presence of the dead. I remember once passing one of the still standing chapels through the gratings of which may be seen neatly ranged rows of human bones, as I was descending late one night a mountain in Lombardy. The moon fell through the bars upon the village ancestors; one old man went by along the narrow way, and said gravely as he went the two words: "È tardi!" It was a scene which always comes back to me when I study the literature of the skeleton.
One of the first of living painters has pointed to the old English custom of carrying about flowers on May Day as a sign that, in the Middle Ages, artistic sensibility and a pleasure in natural beauty were not dead among the common people of England. Nothing can be truer than this way of judging the observance of the Rite of May. Whatever might be the foolishness that it led to here and there, its origin lay always in pure satisfaction at the returned glory of the earth; in the wish to establish a link that could be seen and felt--if only that of holding a green bough or of wearing a daffodil crown--between the children of men and the new and beautiful growth of nature. The sentiment is the same everywhere, but the manner of its expression varies. In warmer lands it finds a vent long before the coming of May. March, in fact, rather than May, seems to have been chosen as the typical spring month in ancient Greece and Rome; and when we see the almond-trees blooming down towards Ponte Molle in the earliest week in February, even March strikes us as a little late for the beginning of the spring festival. A few icicles next morning on the Trevi, act, however, as a corrective to our ideas. In a famous passage Ovid tells the reason why the Romans kept holiday on the first of March: "The ice being broken up, winter at last yields, and the snow melts away, conquered by the sun's gentle warmth; the leaves come back to the trees that were stripped by the cold, the sap-filled bud swells with the tender twig, and the fertile grass, that long lay unseen, finds hidden passages and uplifts itself in the air. Now is the field fruitful, now is the time of the birth of cattle, now the bird prepares its house and home in the bough." (_Fastorum_, lib. iii.)