Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/339

 all that remains of it unbound falls in one curl, shaping itself into a snake's likeness as it unwinds, right against a living snake held to the breast and throat. This is rightly registered as a study for Cleopatra; but notice has not yet been accorded to the subtle and sublime idea which transforms her death by the aspic's bite into a meeting of serpents which recognise and embrace, an encounter between the woman and the worm of Nile, almost as though this match for death were a monstrous love-match, or such a mystic marriage as that painted in the loveliest passage of "Salammbô," between the maiden body and the scaly coils of the serpent and the priestess alike made sacred to the moon; so closely do the snake and the queen of snakes caress and cling. Of this idea Shakespeare also had a vague and great glimpse when he made Antony "murmur, Where's my serpent of old Nile?" mixing a foretaste of her death with the full sweet savour of her supple and amorous "pride of life." For what indeed is lovelier or more luxuriously loving than a strong and graceful snake of the nobler kind?

After this the merely terrible designs of Michel Angelo are shorn of half their horror; even the single face as of one suddenly caught and suddenly released from hell, with wild drapery blown behind it by a wind not of this world, strikes upon the sight and memory of a student less deeply and sharply. Certain of his slight and swift studies for damned souls and devils—designs probably for the final work in which he has embodied and made immortal the dream of a great and righteous judgment between soul and soul—resemble much at first sight, and more on longer inspection, the similar studies