Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/356

 clasped hands in grinning agony of fear, the lips convulsed and sharpened by the rapid spasm; by Antonio, an angel's or virgin's head, over-sweetened into a look of dulcet devotion, but graceful in its fashion; a lady lightly veiled and sharply smiling, with ringlets on the neck and the main mass of hair plaited up behind; groups of saints and virtues, chief among them Justice and Prudence with serpents emblematic of wisdom; a fight of Centaurs and Lapithz; male studies, possibly for his picture of St. Sebastian in the National Gallery; one in half-length stripped naked and seeming to appeal, and one of ruffianly feature looking upwards as though after the flight of his arrow; and a singular allegoric design, in which Fortune from a platform shakes gold into the hands of an infant, borne in the arms of a man weeping aloud and violently, while another child clings to his leg; a winged boy leaning on a bar looks up to the group and laughs; his light glad spiritual scorn, the blind bright indifference of the goddess who gives and the infant who receives gold, the loud agony of the grown man on whom, though bearing in his very hands the chosen of fortune, no flake of the golden rain has fallen; the helpless adherence of the slighted older child; all these are touched with rough suggestive rapidity, and share with many others the chief charm of these studies; that gift, namely, which they give us, of ability to see for a little the passage of swift thoughts and flying fancies across fruitful minds of masters whose daily work was cut out something too much on one pattern, exclusive therefore of new device and mobile invention. Near this is what seems a portrait-drawing of a boy seated, thinking hard, unhandsome, with long mouth, powerful and grave.