Page:A History of Wood-Engraving.djvu/127

Rh are some poor huts; the sun is setting behind a hill. It is the close of a hard day's work. The peasant is old, thickset, and in tatters; the team which he drives before him is lean, worn out by fatigue and scanty food; the ploughshare is buried in a rugged and stubborn soil. In this scene of sweat and habitual toil there is only one being in good spirits and light of foot, a fantastic character, a skeleton with a whip, that runs in the furrow beside the

startled horses and beats them—as it were, a farmer's boy. It is Death." She takes up the story again, after a while. "Is there much consolation," she asks, "in this stoicism, and do devout souls find their account therein? The ambitious, the knave, the tyrant, the sensualist, all the proud sinners who abuse life, and whom Death drags away by the hair, are on their way to a reckoning, no doubt; but the blind, the beggar, the fool, the poor peasant, is there any amends for their long wretchedness in the single reflection that death is not an evil for them? No! an inexorable melancholy, a dismaying fatality, weighs upon the artist's work. It is like a bitter curse launched on the universal human lot."

Certainly the artist's work is a bold and naked statement