his, which at times seem weighty with hidden meaning, were but riddles devised to sharpen courtly wit. I cannot imagine my Leonardo, author of the most profound of all eulogies of solitude, as the entertainer of a fashionable company. In the spiritual biography of my Leonardo I have canceled the hours which the historic Leonardo spent in society; and have sent him instead over mountain slopes and summits, searching for wild flowers and watching the flight of royal eagles.

III

But it is high time that I should turn to my own Leonardo and his secret.

Unlike the Leonardo of history, mine did not die on the second of May, 1519, in the melancholy castle of Cloux. He is still living, and very much alive; he is within me; he is a part of myself, a precious fragment of my spirit.

He dwells as of old in his fair Italy, and stirs me to pulsing meditation in the keen Tuscan springtime. He repeats to me some of his profoundest sayings; he helps me to realize the full wonder of certain sunsets. In the Pantheon of my soul he is one of the most inspiring geniuses, one of the most adored divinities. His image, beside that of his younger brother, Percy Bysshe

Shelley, and opposite that of the Olympian Goethe, illumines the current of my thoughts and charms the tapestry of my unwearying dreams.

Literal folk who consider great men as external and independent beings will reproach me for sacrilege, and express surprise at this adaptation of a genius to the spiritual needs of one obscure soul. They may protest as loudly as they will: they have failed to understand that the great men of the past are in reality instruments of the present, themes on which we may build personality, fragments of olden time through which we may learn to analyze ourselves, dead bodies to which we may give new life. If we content ourselves with knowing the external vicissitudes of the great, the scenes in which they moved, the lists of their works, their characteristic traits. of style, we are simply gathering erudition, we are approaching the temple without prayer, we are entering the orchard without tasting its fruit. But if we seek to know the heroes of the past truly and profoundly, we shall make them members of ourselves, our own instruments of joywe shall save their treasure by enabling them to live again in us. A great man may be known either through dead words and documents or through present and individual consciousness.

Only the poor and the timid choose the former

way.

Thus with historic materials I have created a living Leonardo, who satisfies my need and my desire far better than his prototype.

This second Leonardo is neither a pure scientist nor a pure artist-much less is he an engineer or a courtier. He is the complete type of the inner man unwilling to reveal himself too rich in spiritual fruit, lest greedy folk should ruin him. He loves solitary toil, and feels himself diminished by the presence of others; he knows the power of silence; he gathers for his own sake, and does not cast the treasure of his thoughts amid the crowd. In that first life that was his youth he meditated more than all his fellows, yet he did not publish a single book; his broadwinged fancy conceived the fairest of all visions, the sweetest and most alluring of all faces, yet he left to men but a few unfinished sketches; he was a profound and subtle poet, yet in the heart of the Italian Renaissance he had the heroism not to write a single line. In a word, he is one of those rare men who are sufficient unto themselves, who are not concerned with others; into whose souls, as close and strong as a breastplate, only a few companion spirits win admission.

He is a pagan ascetic, a purified mystic, who chose to ascend the heights of intellectual ecstasy

by the two great paths of art and knowledge. His paintings are but memories of visions he sought to fix in color that he might rise still higher. His observations and his speculations are but doors through which he passed to behold the secrets of nature, to discover throughout the world the pulsing of that life which he perceived, and thus to satisfy the perpetual desire of souls that are incomplete. All his creations, in beauty and in thought, are mystic: steps in the course of his ascent (for he did not choose to follow the way of the Pseudo-Dionysius and Hugh of St. Victor) to that divine state in which all shadow is illumined, from which all littleness is banished-that supreme state which only a few saints, a few artists, and a few philosophers have been able, through utter resolution, to attain.

Like all great men, my Leonardo tends to make his life his masterpiece. His works are but the foot-prints of his path, stones that the master cast by the wayside to mark his progress, though posterity has mistaken them for the objects of his toil. But his purpose lay beyond. And if in his first life his mystic conquest was imperfect, if he did not reach that summit that o'ertops all other heights, he is nearer his goal in this his second life.

In this epoch, when a great revolution in thought is imminent, he represents for me the

achievement of personality, the possession of self, the conquest of the world by means of thought and image. Ibsen's exhortation-"Be yourself" -is absurd. Every one of us is himself, whether he will or no; and when one imitates another it simply means that the instinct of imitation is part of himself. Leonardo da Vinci gives us something better than an exhortation: the glorious example of a life fair, rich, and intimate, a life which seeks ever to surpass itself, to become deeper, more individual, more spiritual.

In the name of this lover of fair forms, who hid that which he loved and that which he discovered, we may proclaim a new age of the spirit, an age for which a little band of his younger brothers is seeking to prepare the way.

Above our common life, outside the throng of those who have not ears to hear, beyond the little steaming ring wherein men seek the means of sustenance, let us speed our hearts toward the master of shadows and of smiles.