Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/344

 from some vessel at his feet rises a thick column of lighted smoke. Another boy with full curled hair is drawn as walking close behind.

Of Sandro Botticelli the samples are more frequent; and in these simple designs the painter is seen at no disadvantage. The dull and dry quality of this thin pallid colouring can here no longer impair the charm of his natural grace, the merit of his strenuous labour. Many of his single figures are worthy of praise and study: the head of a girl with gathered hair; the figure of a youth raised from the dead; that of an old man with a head like a satyr's. Two groups not far apart may be used as studies of his various power and fancy. The first, of two witches loosely draped, not of the great age common to their kind; one stirs and feeds the fire under a caldron of antique fashion and pagan device; one turns away with a hard dull smile showing all her wolfish teeth. The second, of a tuft of marsh-lilies midway on a steep and bare hill-side; under them, where the leaves and moistened earth are cool from the hidden well-head, a nymph lies deeply asleep; Cupid, leaning and laughing over her with a clear and crafty face, presses one hand upon her bosom while the other draws out an arrow. The design is full of fresh beauty, a sense of light and wind and fragrant high-lying land. A Virgin with veil bound up is among the gracefullest and purest of his many studies in that kind. Here also is a sketch for the single figure of Venus, seemingly the one sold in England in 1863, with no girdle of roses round the flanks; not the lovelier or likelier Venus of the two. Another careful satyr-like head suggests the suppressed leaning to gro-