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 the 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 professed 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
overwrought 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.

And in such studies some interfusion of the extremes of beauty and
terror shaped itself, as an image that might be seen and touched, in the
mind of this gracious youth, so fixed that for the rest of his life it
never left him; and as catching glimpses of it in the strange eyes or
hair of chance people, he would follow such about the streets of
Florence till the sun went down, of whom many sketches of his remain.
Some of these are full of a curious beauty, that remote beauty
apprehended only by those who have sought it carefully; who, starting
with acknowledged types of beauty, have refined as far upon these, as
these refine upon the world of common forms. But mingled inext