let, and on the ground. Beside the bier are
the offerings of food and drink which the Greeks used to burn along
with their dead on the funeral pyre. In the left hand corner lies a
shovel for digging the grave that is to receive the ashes. Several men
and women are gathered round the bier, mostly in a group near the head
of Alcestis. They are her friends, and the servants attending her dead
body. At the right hand side of the picture we see a terrible conflict
going on. Death has come in bodily form to meet the funeral
procession, and to take Alcestis away. His limbs are of a ghastly
ashen colour. His wings are black as night. He is wrapped in a dark
mantle, which hides almost the whole of his face, and shows only the
fearful gleam of his eyes. But Hercules is also there, strong and
ruddy, and wearing the skin of a lion which he has slain in one of his
adventures. He has grasped Death by both wrists, and is forcing him
downwards and backwards over his knee. He is plainly overcoming his
adversary. One of the women present is swooning away in fear. Some of
the others are hiding their faces from the dreadful struggle. The rest
are gazing on it with awestruck looks, hardly daring to hope that
Hercules will be victorious.

Browning's poem, which was published in the same year[1] in which Lord
Leighton's painting appeared, contains at the end a description of the
picture, which you will be glad to read here.

"There lies Alkestis dead, beneath the sun,
She longed to look her last upon, beside
The sea, which somehow tempts the life in us
To come trip over its white waste of waves,
And try escape from earth, and fleet as free.
Behind the body, I suppose there bends
Old Pheres in his hoary impotence;
And women-wailers in a corner crouch
* * * * *
Close, each to other, agonising all,
As fastened, in fear's rhythmic sympathy,
To two contending opposite. There strains
The might o' the hero 'gainst his more than match,
--Death, dreadful not in thew and bone, but like
The envenomed substance that exudes some dew
Whereby the merely honest flesh and blood
Will fester up and run to ruin straight,
Ere they can close with, clasp and overcome
The poisonous impalpability
That simulates a form beneath the flow
Of those grey garments."

Now, of course, the story of Admetus and Alcestis is a fable, but for
all that it is not worthless as some