hich to imaginative men
is a moment of invention. On this moment he waits; other moments are but
a preparation, or after-taste of it. Few men distinguish between them as
jealously as he did. Hence so many flaws even in the choicest work. But
for Leonardo the distinction is absolute, and, in the moment of
bien-etre, the alchemy complete: the idea is stricken into colour and
imagery: a cloudy mysticism is refined to a subdued and graceful
mystery, and painting pleases the eye while it satisfies the soul.

*How princely, how characteristic of Leonardo, the answer, Quanto piu,
un'arte porta seco fatica di corpo, tanto piu e vile!

This curious beauty is seen above all in his drawings, and in these
chiefly in the abstract grace of the bounding lines. Let us take some of
these drawings, and pause over them awhile; and, first, one of those at
Florence--the heads of a woman and a little child, set side by side, but
each in its own separate frame. First of all, there is much pathos in
the reappearance in the fuller curves of the face of the child, of the
sharper, more chastened lines of the worn and older face, which leaves
no doubt that the heads are those of a little child and its mother. A
feeling for maternity is indeed always characteristic of Leonardo; and
this feeling is further indicated here by the half-humorous pathos of
the diminutive, rounded shoulders of the child. You may note a like
pathetic power in drawings of a young man seated in a stooping posture,
his face in his hands, as in sorrow; of a slave sitting in an uneasy
inclined posture, in some brief interval of rest; of a small Madonna and
Child, peeping sideways in half-reassured terror, as a mighty griffin
with batlike wings, one of Leonardo's finest inventions, descends
suddenly from the air to snatch up a lion wandering near them. But note
in these, as that which especially belongs to art, the contour of the
young man's hair, the poise of the slave's arm above his head, and the
curves of the head of the child, following the little skull within, thin
and fine as some seashell worn by the wind.

Take again another head, still more full of sentiment, but of a
different kind, a little drawing in red chalk which every one remembers
who has examined at all carefully the drawings by old masters at the
Louvre. It is a face of doubtful sex, set in the shadow of its own hair,
the cheek-line in high light against it, with something voluptuous and
full in the eyelids