uty into which the soul with all
its maladies has passed? All the thoughts and experience of the world
have etched and moulded there in that which they have of power to refine
and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust
of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and
imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the
vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the
grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day
about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and,
as Leda, was mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne, the mother of
Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes,
and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing
lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a
perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old
one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought
upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life.
Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the
symbol of the modern idea.

During these years at Florence Leonardo's history is the history of his
art; he himself is lost in the bright cloud of it. The outward history
begins again in 1502, with a wild journey through central Italy, which
he makes as the chief engineer of Caesar Borgia. The biographer, putting
together the stray jottings of his manuscripts, may follow him through
every day of it, up the strange tower of Sienna, which looks towards
Rome, elastic like a bent bow, down to the sea-shore at Piombino, each
place appearing as fitfully as in a fevered dream.... We catch a glimpse
of him again at Rome in 1514, surrounded by his mirrors and vials and
furnaces, making strange toys that seemed alive of wax and quicksilver.
The hesitation which had haunted him all through life, and made like one
under a spell, was upon him now with double force. No one had ever
carried political indifferentism farther; it had always been his
philosophy to "fly before the storm;" he is for the Sforzas or against
them, as the tide of their fortune turns. Yet now he was suspected by
the anti-Gallian society at Rome of French tendencies. It paralyzed him
to find himself among enemies; and he turned wholly to France, which had
long courte