By way of contrast to this sombre canvas, take the glowing and brilliant colours of the _Perseus and Andromeda_, one of the three pictures shown at the Academy in 1891. The painting of the surroundings of Andromeda, the deep blue water in the sea lagoon beneath, and these radiant elemental people of air and light, provides such a glow of colour, as haunts the eye for long after one has gazed one's fill upon it. Something of the same feeling for the spirit that is in the forces of the earth, lurks behind many of Leighton's representments of the classic myths. It is certainly to be found, with a difference, in the _Return of Persephone_, exhibited with the _Perseus_, which becomes in the artist's hands a profound allegory of the return of Spring, with all kind of symbolical meanings in the three figures of Proserpine, Ceres, and Hermes, that are seen meeting before the mouth of Hades. _The Spirit of the Summit_, one of the latest of these embodiments of the relation of Man to Nature, may be read to mean Man's finer spirit of aspiration, and the mountainous imagination of Art itself. It is characteristic of the artist that, in the later years of his career, at a time when most artists and men are apt to give up something of their earlier pursuit of ideals, he retained undiminished a feeling for the unaccomplished heights of the imagination. _The Spirit of the Summit_ may serve, then, as the symbol, not so much of things attained, and Art victorious, as of things that are always to be attained, and of Art striving and undeterred. In this way it may serve, too, as in some sort the emblem of Leighton's own ideals, and of his whole career. His artistic temper was throughout, one of endless energy, endless determination; with a dash of that finer dissatisfaction which is always seeking out new embodiments, under all difficulties, of Man's pursuit, in a difficult, and often an unbeautiful world, of Truth and Beauty. Above all, he was a consummate draughtsman, and as Francisco Pacheco, the father-in-law of Velasquez, wrote in his "Arte de la Pintura" (1649): "Drawing is the life and soul of painting; drawing, especially outline, is the hardest; nay, the Art has, strictly speaking, no other difficulty. Without drawing painting is nothing but a vulgar craft; those who neglect it are bastards of the Art, mere daubers and blotchers." [Illustration: STUDY FOR "THE RETURN OF PERSEPHONE"] [Illustration: STUDY FOR "PERSEPHONE"] CHAPTER VII MURAL DECORATION, SCULPTURE, AND ILLUSTRATION