Their sympathies as poets must have drawn them together. Francis, as Joseph Goerres well says, was a troubadour as well as a saint. In his youth he had won distinction as a singer of worldly songs in the provençal French, which was then the language of literature in Northern Italy. After his conversion he burst out singing the praises of God in this same foreign and exotic tongue. But as he became more directly interested in the welfare of his fellow-men, he began to use his gift of song in his native Italian. How many of the poems that are printed under his name are really his own, and how many are the work of his disciple, Jacopone da Todi, is matter of dispute. But even Father Affo (1777), the most negative of critics on this point, does not deny his authorship of the wonderful “Song of the Sun,” also called the “Song of the Creatures,” in which the childlike delight of the saint in God’s works finds such charming expression, that Matthew Arnold has singled it out as the utterance of what is most exquisite in the spirit of his century. Thomas, too, it was known, had the poetic gift, and indeed was recognized by his brethren as the man of most literary power in the order. Upon him they laid the duty of compiling the founder’s biography, and of writing the “legend” of his life, which should be read in the breviary service on the day of his commemoration. Yet he also was recognized as possessing practical gifts. The order had spread into Germany as well as in the other directions of which Francis had prophesied. The first attempts to establish it north of the Alps, made in 1216, were not happy. The Italians sent on this mission knew only one German word, “Ja!” “Are you heretics?” (_Sind Sie Ketzer?_) was the first question put to them on Teutonic soil; and knowing nothing else to say, they said “Ja!” So they were marched across the frontier again in disgrace. But brethren better provided in the matter of their Ollendorff had been sent five years later, and now Thomas of Celano was one of those who had been selected for the German mission, to give stability and unity to the work there. He was made “custos” of the monasteries at Mainz, Worms and Koeln (Cologne), and even took charge of the whole province when its head returned to Assisi. We find Thomas himself back in Assisi by 1230, where Jordan, the “custos” of the Thuringian monasteries, came to see him.