• This distinguished mystic and enthusiast of the twelfth century was born in 1130 at the village of Celio, near Cosenza in Calabria, on the river Busento, in whose bed the remains of Attila were buried. A part of his youth was passed at Naples, where his father held some office in the court of King Roger; but from the temptations of this gay capital he escaped, and, like St. Francis, renouncing the world, gave himself up to monastic life. “A tender and religious soul,” says Rousselot in his Histoire de l’Évangile Éternel , p. 15, “an imagination ardent and early turned towards asceticism, led him from his first youth to embrace the monastic life. His spirit, naturally exalted, must have received the most lively impressions from the spectacle offered him by the place of his birth: mountains arid or burdened with forests, deep valleys furrowed by the waters of torrents; a soil, rough in some places, and covered in others with a brilliant vegetation; a heaven of fire; solitude, so easily found in Calabria, and so dear to souls inclined to mysticism⁠—all combined to exalt in Joachim the religious sentiment. There are places where life is naturally poetical, and when the soul, thus nourished by things external, plunges into the divine world, it produces men like St.