s of boughs and yellow gleams of sunlight flickering fantastically
across the clear and supple forms of the sculptured marble "And already
upwards returning, he had escaped all mishaps, and the given-back
Eurydice was coming into the upper air, walking behind him, for
Proserpina had made this condition. When, of a sudden, a madness seized
on the unwily lover--pardonable, surely, if ghosts but knew how to
pardon. He stood, and back on his Eurydice, already in our sunlight,
he looked, forgetful, alas! and broken of will. Then was all the work
undone, broken was the compact with the unkind lord, and vainly had he
thrice heard the waters of hell sounding. Then she--'What madness has
ruined me, wretched one, and thee, also, Orpheus? For I am called by the
cruel Fates to return, and sleep closes my swimming eyes. So, farewell.
I am borne away muffled in thick night, stretching forth to thee (alas,
thine no longer!) my helpless hands.' She spoke, and from his sight
suddenly, even as thin smoke mingles with air, disappeared; nor him,
vainly clasping the shadows, and many things wishing to say, did she
see again." These lines suggest a bas-relief to us, because a real
bas-relief is really connected with them in our mind, and this
connection led to a curious little incident in our aesthetic life, which
is worth narrating. The bas-relief in question is a sufficiently obscure
piece of Greek workmanship, one of those mediocre, much-degraded works
of art with which Roman galleries abound, and among which, though left
unnoticed by the crowd that gathers round the Apollo, or the Augustus,
or the Discobolus, we may sometimes divine a repetition of some great
lost work of antiquity, some feeble reflection of lost perfection. It
is let into the wall of a hall of the Villa Albani, where people throng
past it in search of the rigid, pseudo-Attic Antinous. And it is as
simple as the verses of Virgil: merely three figures slightly raised out
of the flat, blank back-ground, Eurydice between Orpheus and Hermes.
The three figures stand distinctly apart and in a row. Orpheus touches
Eurydice's veil, and her hand rests on his shoulder, while the other
hand, drooping supine, is grasped by Hermes. There is no grouping, no
embracing, no violence of gesture--nay, scarcely any gesture at all; yet
for us there is in it a whole drama, the whole pathos of Virgil's lines.
Eurydice has returned, she is standing beneath our sun--_jam luce sub
ipsa_--but for th