Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE ROMANCE OF THE NEW WORLD JUST BEFORE THE DAWN YOUTH is always interesting, always delightful. The romance of the New World has for its scene the Renaissance, that time of the new birth, of the youthful bound of the human spirit; that time in which is to be seen what Mr. Symonds calls " the first transcendent bloom of the adolescence of the modern world." It is usual, speaking in a rough way, to consider the period of the Italian Renaissance as extending from about the year 1450 to about the year 1550. But before daylight comes the dawn. The Renaissance did not burst upon the world with a sudden dazzling light, but before it came many signs of the morning. As the singing of birds is one of the earliest signs of the dawn of a summer morning, sothe Renaissance was ushered in by a world bursting into song; a world possessed with a passion for legend and romance | a world listening to the poetic tales of chivalry and to the story of the old Celtic and German mythical heroes. Some of us are familiar with the distributing room of the Boston Public Library and have been interested in the completion of the splendid series of designs by Mr. Abbey illustrating the story of "The Quest of the Holy Grail." Here we see the child Galahad, brought up by the holy nuns and visited by the dove with the golden censer and the angel bearing the Grail, which, as the legend runs, was the sacred vessel from which our Lord had eaten at the Last Supper, and in which had been subsequently gathered by Joseph of Arimathea the divine blood of his wounds. We see the young Galahad watching alone in the church until dawn, keeping his knightly vigil; we see him clad in red and made ready for departure on his sacred mission by pure and brave hands. We see him installed in the Seat Perilous which none bef...