“The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the world are come,’ and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.” Such writing as this has an undeniable magic about it; though its vagueness is not wholly characteristic of Pater’s ordinary manner, it is a wonderful achievement; it is more like a musical fantasia, embodying hints and echoes, touching with life a store of reveries and dreams, opening up strange avenues of dreamful thought, than a precise description of any actual work of art. To say that Leonardo himself would have disclaimed this interpretation of his picture is not to dispel the beauty of the criticism; for the magical power of art is its quickening spirit, its faculty of touching trains of thought that run far beyond the visible and bounding horizon. It is possible, too, to dislike the passage for its strong and luscious fragrance, its overpowering sensuousness, to say that it is touched with decadence, in its dwelling on the beauty of evil, made fair by remoteness; but this is to take an ethical view of it, to foresee contingencies, to apprehend the ultimate force of its appeal. As in all lofty art, the beauty is inexplicable, the charm incommunicable; its sincerity, its zest is apparent; and it can hardly be excelled as a typical instance of the prose that is essentially poetical, in its liquid cadences, its echoing rhythms. In any case, whether one feels the charm of the passage or not, it must remain as perhaps the best instance of Pater’s early mastery of his art, in its most elaborate and finished form.