Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/117

 fleshly charm, dominant in ear and eye. The tragic might of the myth, its fierce and keen significance, strikes through us sharpest at the end, as with the supreme sting of triumph and final fang of the transfigured serpent.

Had I time and room and skill, to whom all these are wanting, I would here at length try to say some passing word illustrative of the more obvious and the more intimate relations of this artist's work in verse and his work in painting; between the poem of "Jenny" and the design called "Found," where at early dawn the driver of a country cart finds crouching in London streets the figure of a girl once his betrothed, and stoops to lift with tender strength of love, and surprise of simple pity startled into freshness of pain, the shuddering abased head with the golden ruin of its rich soiled hair, which cowers against a graveyard wall away from the light that rises beyond the paling lamps on bridge and river; between the song of "Troy Town" and the picture of Helen, with Parian face and mouth of ardent blossom, a keen red flower-bud of fire, framed in broad gold of widespread locks, the sweet sharp smile of power set fast on her clear curved lips, and far behind her the dull flame of burning towers and light from reddened heaven on dark sails of lurid ships; between the early sacred poems and the early sacred designs of the author's Christian era, as for instance the "Ave" and the "Girlhood of the Virgin," with its young grace and sincere splendour of spirit, the "Staff and Scrip" and the design of "Fra Pace," the "Blessed Damozel" and the "Dream of Dante," all clothed in colours of heaven, with raiment dyed and