Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/348

 seen Mr. E. Burne Jones's nobler drawing of the young Sidonia wearing a gown whose pattern is of branching and knotted snakes, black upon the golden stuff; for the garment of this witch also is looped up and brooched with serpents. Not far off is the figure of a youth, turbaned, with both hands clasping a staff; his face that of one suddenly startled; noticeable, as are all these smaller studies, for graceful and individual character. Two larger sketches in the same room seem to be either parts of a single story or dubious and tentative studies taken while the artist had not made up his mind how to work and what to work upon. In the one, Cupids discover a knight sleeping in some dim spell-bound place; with soft laughter, with silent feet and swift fingers, they draw off his armour and steal away the sword and helmet, leaving his head bare to the dew and wind of that strange twilight. In the other division, parted off by a mere rough line drawn across the paper, a knight armed, and newly-landed from a ship just inshore, finds a maiden asleep under the sea-rocks; in the low sky behind the ship a faint fire of dawn has risen, and touches the shadowed shore and the dissolving clouds with growing and hesitating light. The design was not improbably made for a picture of Bacchus and Ariadne; it has the cold and lucid beauty of an older legend translated and transformed into mediæval shape. More than any others, these painters of the early Florentine school reproduce in their own art the style of thought and work familiar to a student of Chaucer and his fellows: or pupils, Nymphs have faded into fairies, and gods subsided into men. A curious realism has grown up out of that very ignorance and perversion which seemed as if