In the frescoes of Giotto or the verse of Dante we see him take Poverty for his bride.

He strips himself of all, he flings his very clothes at his father's feet, that he may be one with Nature and God.

His passionate verse claims the moon for his sister and the sun for his brother, he calls on his brother the Wind, and his sister the Water.

His last faint cry was a "Welcome, Sister Death!" Strangely as the two men differed from each other, their aim was the same--to convert the heathen, to extirpate heresy, to reconcile knowledge with orthodoxy, above all to carry the Gospel to the poor.

The work was to be done by an utter reversal of the older monasticism, by seeking personal salvation in effort for the salvation of their fellow-men, by exchanging the solitary of the cloister for the preacher, the monk for the "brother" or friar.