Leonardo - Page 2

my chin
in, too, just by force of example, I suppose--so easily are we
influenced. When you walk with some folks you slouch along, but
others there be who make you feel an upward lift and skyey
gravitation--it is very curious!

Yet I do really believe White Pigeon is forty, or awfully close to
it. There are silver streaks among her brown braids, and surely the
peachblow has long gone from her cheek. Then she was awfully tanned
--and that little mole on her forehead, and its mate on her chin,
stand out more than ever, like the freckles on the face of
Alcibiades Roycroft when he has taken on his August russet.

I think White Pigeon must be near forty! That is the second book she
has stolen from me; the other was Max Muller's "Memories"--it was at
the Louvre in Paris, August the Fourteenth, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-
five, as we sat on a bench, silent before the "Mona Lisa" of
Leonardo.

This book, "Renaissance Masters," I didn't care much for, anyway. I
got no information from it, yet it gave me a sort o' glow--that is
all--like that lecture which I heard in my boyhood by Wendell
Phillips.

There is only one thing in the book I remember, but that stands out
as clearly as the little mole on White Pigeon's forehead. The author
said that Leonardo da Vinci invented more useful appliances than any
other man who ever lived, except our own Edison.

I know Edison: he is a most lovable man (because he is himself),
very deaf--and glad of it, he says, because it saves him from
hearing a lot of things he doesn't wish to hear. "It is like this,"
he once said to me: "deafness gives you a needed isolation; reduces
your sensitiveness so things do not disturb or distract; allows you
to concentrate and focus on a thought until you run it down--see?"

Edison is a great Philistine--reads everything I write--has a
complete file of the little brownie magazine; and some of the
"Little Journeys" I saw he had interlined and marked. I think Edison
is one of the greatest men I ever met--he appreciates Good Things.

I told Edison how this writer, Rose, had compared him with Leonardo.
He smiled and said, "Who is Rose?" Then after a little pause he
continued, "The Great Man is one who has been a long time dead--the
woods are full of wizards, but not many of them know that"; and the
Wizard laughed softly at his own joke.

What kind of a man was Leonardo? Why, he was the same kind of a man
as Edison--only Leonardo was thin and tall, while Edison is stout.
But you and I would be at home with either. Both are classics and
therefore essentially modern. Leonardo studied Nature at first hand
--he took nothing for