him like twining and contorted scorpions, so that he preferred to gaze on anything but written scrolls.  He would then turn to music or painting, or to the physical sports in which he excelled.  The language in which this alternation of passion and disgust for study is expressed, bears on it the stamp of Alberti’s peculiar temperament, his fervid and imaginative genius, instinct with subtle sympathies and strange repugnances.  Flying from his study, he would then betake himself to the open air.  No one surpassed him in running, in wrestling, in the force with which he cast his javelin or discharged his arrows.  So sure was his aim and so skilful his cast, that he could fling a farthing from the pavement of the square, and make it ring against a church roof far above.  When he chose to jump, he put his feet together and bounded over the shoulders of men standing erect upon the ground.  On horseback he maintained perfect equilibrium, and seemed incapable of fatigue.  The most restive and vicious animals trembled under him and became like lambs.  There was a kind of magnetism in the man.  We read, besides these feats of strength and skill, that he took pleasure in climbing mountains, for no other purpose apparently than for the joy of being close to nature.

In this, as in many other of his instincts, Alberti was before his age.  To care for the beauties of landscape unadorned by art, and to sympathise with sublime or rugged scenery, was not in the spirit of the Renaissance.  Humanity occupied the attention of poets and painters; and the age was yet far distant when the pantheistic feeling for the world should produce the art of Wordsworth and of Turner.  Yet a few great natures even then began to comprehend the charm and mystery which the Greeks had imaged in their Pan, the sense of an all-pervasive spirit in wild places, the feeling of a hidden want, the invisible tie which makes man a part of rocks and woods and streams around him.  Petrarch had already ascended the summit of Mont Ventoux, to meditate, with an exaltation of the soul he scarcely understood, upon the scene spread at his feet and above his head.  AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini delighted in wild places for no mere pleasure of the chase, but for the joy he took in communing with nature.  How S. Francis found God in the sun and the air, the water and the stars, we know by his celebrated hymn; and of Dante’s acute observation, every canto of the ‘Divine Comedy’ is witness.

Leo Alberti was touched in spirit by even a deeper and a stranger pathos than any of these men:  ’In the early spring, when he beheld the meadows and hills covered with flowers, and saw the trees and plants of all kinds bearing promise of fruit, his heart became exceeding sorrowful; and when in autumn he looked on fields heavy with harvest and orchards apple-laden, he felt such grief that many even saw him weep for the sadness of his soul.’  It would seem that he scarcely understood the source of this sweet trouble:  for at such times he compared the sloth and inutility of men with the industry and fertility of nature; as though this were the secret of his melancholy.  A poet of our century has noted the same stirring of the spirit, and has striven to account for it:—­