ose there bends
Old Pheres in his hoary impotence;
And women-wailers, in a corner crouch
--Four, beautiful as you four,--yes, indeed!
Close, each to other, agonizing all,
As fastened, in fear's rhythmic sympathy,
To two contending opposite. There strains
The might o' the hero 'gainst his more than match,
--Death, dreadful not in thew and bone, but like
The envenomed substance that exudes some dew,
Whereby the merely honest flesh and blood
Will fester up and run to ruin straight,
Ere they can close with, clasp and overcome,
The poisonous impalpability
That simulates a form beneath the flow
Of those grey garments; I pronounce that piece
Worthy to set up in our Poikile!"

[Illustration: HERCULES WRESTLING WITH DEATH FOR THE BODY OF ALCESTIS
(1871)]

[Illustration: SUMMER MOON (1872)
_By permission of Messrs. P. and D. Colnaghi and Co._]

To 1872 belongs the _Summer Moon_, one of the loveliest things ever
shown at the Academy, a picture full of that rarer feeling for light and
colour, which the artist achieved again and again in his treatment of
sunset, twilight, and night effects. _After Vespers_, exhibited the same
year, is a three-quarter length figure of a girl in a green robe
standing in front of a bench, holding in her right hand a string of
beads. This year's Academy held also _A Condottiere_, the noble figure
of a man in armour, now in the Birmingham Municipal Gallery, and a
portrait of the _Right Hon. Edward Ryan_. Hardly less memorable was
_Moretta_, exhibited in the Academy of 1873, in the words of a critic of
the day, "one of the most subtle and fortunate productions of the
painter." _Moretta_ is robed in green, with masses of loosely arranged
hair, and a tender and delicate face. _Weaving the Wreath_, shown the
same year (and again in the Guildhall, 1895), is a very charming figure
of quite a young girl seated on a carpet upon a raised step at the foot
of a building. Behind her is a bas-relief, against which her head,
crowned by a chaplet of flowers, tells out with sculpturesque effect;
the sharp, vertical line of thread strained between her hands, and
thence in diagonal line to the ball at her feet, is curiously rigid, and
by contrast makes the draperies across which it is silhouetted appear
still more mobile.

We are passing over, deliberately, the artist's decorative masterpieces
of this period,--the South Kensington frescoes to wit; of which the