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the various and strange shapes made by formative nature, and having
wandered some distance among gloomy rocks, I came to the entrance of
a great cavern, in front of which I stood some time, astonished and
unaware of such a thing. Bending my back into an arch I rested my
left hand on my knee and held my right hand over my down-cast and
contracted eye brows: often bending first one way and then the
other, to see whether I could discover anything inside, and this
being forbidden by the deep darkness within, and after having
remained there some time, two contrary emotions arose in me, fear
and desire--fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see
whether there were any marvellous thing within it ...
Drafts of Letters to Lodovico il Moro (1340-1345).
1
340.
[
Footnote: The numerous corrections, the alterations in the figures
l. 18) and the absence of any signature prove that this is merely
(
the rough draft of a letter to Lodovico il Moro. It is one of the
very few manuscripts which are written from left to right--see the
facsimile of the beginning as here reproduced. This is probably the
final sketch of a document the clean of which copy was written in
the usual manner. Leonardo no doubt very rarely wrote so, and this
is probably the reason of the conspicuous dissimilarity in the
handwriting, when he did. (Compare Pl. XXXVIII.) It is noteworthy
too that here the orthography and abbreviations are also
1084
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