Tears from the depth of some divine despair
  Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
  In looking on the happy autumn fields,
  And thinking of the days that are no more.

Both Alberti and Tennyson have connected the mal du pays of the human soul for that ancient country of its birth, the mild Saturnian earth from which we sprang, with a sense of loss.  It is the waste of human energy that affects Alberti; the waste of human life touches the modern poet.  Yet both perhaps have scarcely interpreted their own spirit; for is not the true source of tears deeper and more secret?  Man is a child of nature in the simplest sense; and the stirrings of the secular breasts that gave him suck, and on which he even now must hang, have potent influences over his emotions.

Of Alberti’s extraordinary sensitiveness to all such impressions many curious tales are told.  The sight of refulgent jewels, of flowers, and of fair landscapes, had the same effect upon his nerves as the sound of the Dorian mood upon the youths whom Pythagoras cured of passion by music.  He found in them an anodyne for pain, a restoration from sickness.  Like Walt Whitman, who adheres to nature by closer and more vital sympathy than any other poet of the modern world, Alberti felt the charm of excellent old age no less than that of florid youth.  ’On old men gifted with a noble presence and hale and vigorous, he gazed again and again, and said that he revered in them the delights of nature (naturae delitias).’  Beasts and birds and all living creatures moved him to admiration for the grace with which they had been gifted, each in his own kind.  It is even said that he composed a funeral oration for a dog which he had loved and which died.

To this sensibility for all fair things in nature, Alberti added the charm of a singularly sweet temper and graceful conversation.  The activity of his mind, which was always being exercised on subjects of grave speculation, removed him from the noise and bustle of commonplace society.  He was somewhat silent, inclined to solitude, and of a pensive countenance; yet no man found him difficult of access:  his courtesy was exquisite, and among familiar friends he was noted for the flashes of a delicate and subtle wit.  Collections were made of his apophthegms by friends, and some are recorded by his anonymous biographer.[5] Their finer perfume, as almost always happens with good sayings which do not certain the full pith of a proverb, but owe their force, in part at least, to the personality of their author, and to the happy moment of their production, has evanesced.  Here, however, is one which seems still to bear the impress of Alberti’s genius:  ’Gold is the soul of labour, and labour the slave of pleasure.’  Of women he used to say that their inconstancy was an antidote to their falseness; for if a woman could but persevere in what she undertook, all the fair works of men would be ruined.  One of his strongest