"I know, too, a great Kaunian painter, strong As Herakles, though rosy with a robe Of grace that softens down the sinewy strength: And he has made a picture of it all. 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 --Four, beautiful as you four,--yes, indeed! Close, each to other, agonizing 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; I pronounce that piece Worthy to set up in our Poikilé!" [Illustration: HERCULES WRESTLING WITH DEATH FOR THE BODY OF ALCESTIS (1871)] [Illustration: SUMMER MOON (1872) _By permission of Messrs. P. and D. Colnaghi and Co._] To 1872 belongs the _Summer Moon_, one of the loveliest things ever shown at the Academy, a picture full of that rarer feeling for light and colour, which the artist achieved again and again in his treatment of sunset, twilight, and night effects. _After Vespers_, exhibited the same year, is a three-quarter length figure of a girl in a green robe standing in front of a bench, holding in her right hand a string of beads. This year's Academy held also _A Condottiere_, the noble figure of a man in armour, now in the Birmingham Municipal Gallery, and a portrait of the _Right Hon. Edward Ryan_. Hardly less memorable was _Moretta_, exhibited in the Academy of 1873, in the words of a critic of the day, "one of the most subtle and fortunate productions of the painter." _Moretta_ is robed in green, with masses of loosely arranged hair, and a tender and delicate face. _Weaving the Wreath_, shown the same year (and again in the Guildhall, 1895), is a very charming figure of quite a young girl seated on a carpet upon a raised step at the foot of a building. Behind her is a bas-relief, against which her head, crowned by a chaplet of flowers, tells out with sculpturesque effect; the sharp, vertical line of thread strained between her hands, and thence in diagonal line to the ball at her feet, is curiously rigid, and by contrast makes the draperies across which it is silhouetted appear still more mobile.