curious secrets and a hidden knowledge, living in a world of which he alone possessed the key.  What his philosophy seems to have been most like is that of Paracelsus or Cardan; and much of the spirit of the older alchemy still hangs about it, with its confidence in short cuts and odd byways to knowledge.  To him philosophy was to be something giving strange swiftness and double sight, divining the sources of springs beneath the earth or of expression beneath the human countenance, clairvoyant of occult gifts in common or uncommon things, in the reed at the brook-side or the star which draws near to us but once in a century.  How in this way the clear purpose was overclouded, the fine chaser’s head perplexed, we but dimly see; the mystery which at no point quite lifts from Leonardo’s life is deepest here.  But it is certain that at one period of his life he had almost ceased to be an artist.

The year 1483—­the year of the birth of Raffaelle and the thirty-first of Leonardo’s life—­is fixed as the date of his visit to Milan by the letter in which he recommends himself to Ludovico Sforza, and offers to tell him for a price strange secrets in the art of war.  It was that Sforza who murdered his young nephew by slow poison, yet was so susceptible to religious impressions that he turned his worst passions into a kind of religious cultus, and who took for his device the mulberry tree—­symbol, in its long delay and sudden yielding of flowers and fruit together, of a wisdom which economizes all forces for an opportunity of sudden and sure effect.  The fame of Leonardo had gone before him, and he was to model a colossal statue of Francesco, the first duke.  As for Leonardo himself he came not as an artist at all, or careful of the fame of one; but as a player on the harp, a strange harp of silver of his own construction, shaped in some curious likeness to a horse’s skull.  The capricious spirit of Ludovico was susceptible to the charm of music, and Leonardo’s nature had a kind of spell in it.  Fascination is always the word descriptive of him.  No portrait of his youth remains; but all tends to make us believe that up to this time some charm of voice and aspect, strong enough to balance the disadvantage of his birth, had played about him.  His physical strength was great; it was said that he could bend a horseshoe like a coil of lead.

The Duomo, the work of artists from beyond the Alps, so fantastic to a Florentine used to the mellow unbroken surfaces of Giotto and Arnolfo, was then in all its freshness; and below, in the streets of Milan, moved a people as fantastic, changeful, and dreamlike.  To Leonardo least of all men could there be anything poisonous in the exotic flowers of sentiment which grew there.  It was a life of exquisite amusements, (Leonardo became a celebrated designer of pageants,) and brilliant sins; and it suited the quality of his genius, composed in almost equal parts of curiosity and the desire of beauty, to take things as they came.