in which this alternation of passion and disgust for study is
expressed, bears on it the stamp of Alberti's peculiar temperament,
his fervid and imaginative genius, instinct with subtle sympathies and
strange repugnances. Flying from his study, he would then betake
himself to the open air. No one surpassed him in running, in
wrestling, in the force with which he cast his javelin or discharged
his arrows. So sure was his aim and so skilful his cast, that he could
fling a farthing from the pavement of the square, and make it ring
against a church roof far above. When he chose to jump, he put his
feet together and bounded over the shoulders of men standing erect
upon the ground. On horseback he maintained perfect equilibrium, and
seemed incapable of fatigue. The most restive and vicious animals
trembled under him and became like lambs. There was a kind of
magnetism in the man. We read, besides these feats of strength and
skill, that he took pleasure in climbing mountains, for no other
purpose apparently than for the joy of being close to nature.

In this, as in many other of his instincts, Alberti was before his
age. To care for the beauties of landscape unadorned by art, and to
sympathise with sublime or rugged scenery, was not in the spirit of
the Renaissance. Humanity occupied the attention of poets and
painters; and the age was yet far distant when the pantheistic feeling
for the world should produce the art of Wordsworth and of Turner. Yet
a few great natures even then began to comprehend the charm and
mystery which the Greeks had imaged in their Pan, the sense of an
all-pervasive spirit in wild places, the feeling of a hidden want, the
invisible tie which makes man a part of rocks and woods and streams
around him. Petrarch had already ascended the summit of Mont Ventoux,
to meditate, with an exaltation of the soul he scarcely understood,
upon the scene spread at his feet and above his head. Æneas Sylvius