(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
Everything that Burne-Jones has created is at once fragrant, mystical, and austere, like this picture. His range of subject is most extensive. In his _Princess_ Alfred Tennyson had quickened into new life the legends of chivalry, and in his _Idylls of the King_ the tales of the Knights of the Holy Grail. Swinburne published his _Atalanta in Calydon_, in which he exercised once more the mysterious spell of the ancient drama, while he created in _Chastelard_, _Bothwell_, and _Mary Stuart_ a trilogy of the finest historical tragedies ever written, and showed in _Tristram of Lyonesse_ that even Tennyson had not exhausted all the beauty in old legends of the time of King Arthur; while, as early as 1866, he had given to the world his _Poems and Ballads_, dedicated to Burne-Jones. In these works lie the ideas to which the painter has given form and colour.
(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, owner of the copyright._)]
He paints Circe in a saffron robe, preparing the potion to enchant the companions of Ulysses, with a strange light in her orbs, while two panthers fawn at her feet. He represents the goddess of Discord at the marriage-feast of Thetis, a ghastly, pallid figure, entering amongst the gods who are celebrating the occasion, and holding the fateful apple in her hand. He depicts Pygmalion, the artist King of Cyprus, supplicating Aphrodite to breathe life into the sculptured image of a maiden, the work of his own hands.
Apart from classical antiquity, he owes some of his inspiration to the Bible and Christian legends, the sublimity of their grave tragedies, and the troubled sadness of their yearning and exaltation. One of his leading works devotes six pictures to the days of creation. An angel--accompanied in every case by the angels of the previous days--carries a sphere, in which may be seen the stars, the waters, the trees, the animals, and the first man and woman, in their proper sequence. The scene of the "Adoration of the Kings" is a landscape where fragrant roses bloom in the shadow of the slender stems of trees, which rise straight as a bolt. The Virgin sits in their midst calm and unapproachable, and in her lap the Child, who is more slender than in the pictures of Cimabue. The three Wise Men--tall, gigantic figures, clad in rich mediæval garments--approach softly, whilst an angel floats perpendicularly in the air as a silent witness.