to Michelet and
others to have anticipated modern ideas. He trifles with his genius, and
crowds all his chief work into a few tormented years of later life; yet
he is so possessed by his genius that he passes unmoved through the most
tragic events, overwhelming his country and friends, like one who comes
across them by chance on some secret errand....

[Illustration: MONNA LISA.
_L. da Vinci_.]

His art, if it was to be something in the world, must be weighted with
more of the meaning of nature and purpose of humanity. Nature was "the
true mistress of higher intelligences." So he plunged into the study of
nature. And in doing this he followed the manner of the older students;
he brooded over the hidden virtues of plants and crystals, the lines
traced by stars as they moved in the sky, over the correspondences which
exist between the different orders of living things, through which, to
eyes opened, they interpret each other; and for years he seemed to those
about him as one listening to a voice silent for other men.

He learned here the art of going deep, of tracking the sources of
expression to their subtlest retreats, the power of an intimate presence
in the things he handled. He did not at once or entirely desert his art;
only he was no longer the cheerful objective painter, through whose
soul, as through clear glass, the bright figures of Florentine life,
only made a little mellower and more pensive by the transit, passed on
to the white wall. He wasted many days in curious tricks of design,
seeming to lose himself in the spinning of intricate devices of lines
and colours. He was smitten with a love of the impossible--the
perforation of mountains, changing the course of rivers, raising great
buildings, such as the church of San Giovanni, in the air; all those
feats for the performance of which natural magic professes to have the
key. Later writers, indeed, see in these efforts an anticipation of
modern mechanics; in him they were rather dreams, thrown off by the
over-wrought and labouring brain. Two ideas were especially fixed in
him, as reflexes of things that had touched his brain in childhood
beyond the measure of other impressions--the smiling of women and the
motion of great waters....

The science of that age was all divination, clairvoyance, unsubjected to
our exact modern formulas, seeking in an instant of vision to
concentrate a thousand experiences. Later writers, thinking only of the
well-ord