The essay on “Leonardo da Vinci” is certainly the most brilliant of all the essays, and contains elaborate passages which, for meditative sublimity and exquisite phrasing, Pater never surpassed. The fitful, mysterious, beauty-haunted nature of Leonardo, the stream of his life broken into such various channels, his absorption, his remoteness, passing “unmoved through the most tragic events, overwhelming his country and friends, like one who comes across them by chance on some secret errand”—all this had a potent attraction for Pater. The essay is a wonderful piece of constructive skill, interweaving as it does all the salient features of the “legend” of Vasari with a perfect illustrative felicity. But it is in the descriptive passages that Pater touches the extreme of skill, as for instance in his description of the sea-shore of the Saint Anne, “that delicate place, where the wind passes like the hand of some fine etcher over the surface, and the untorn shells are lying thick upon the sand, and the tops of the rocks, to which the waves never rise, are green with grass, grown fine as hair. It is the landscape, not of dreams or of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand with a miracle of _finesse_. Through Leonardo’s strange veil of sight things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through deep water.” Though the celebrated passage which describes “La Gioconda” has been abundantly quoted, it may here be given in full:—