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
