No complete work evinces more conclusively the force of Leighton's dramatic gift than "Electra"; and--further--masterly and beautiful as are all Leighton's arrangements of drapery, those in this design strike me as specially expressive. They are truly superb. The balance of the masses, and the sweeping lines from the feet up to the shoulder and over the chest, are grandly conceived--the arrangement of the folds notably adding to the suggestion of tragic feeling in the attitude of the figure. "Icarus," in the picture of the inventive father and the aspiring son, is a beautiful figure of a youth. The conception, design, and colouring of the picture are worthy of Leighton at his best. Though Egypt had made a deep impression on Leighton's æsthetic emotions, as is obvious from his Diary, his visit there apparently did not actually suggest any pictures except "A Nile Woman"--the only work exhibited at the Academy in 1870--and "Egyptian Slinger Scaring Birds in Harvest-time: Moonrise," exhibited in 1875. A subject suggested by an event, which had occurred some years previously, appears to have been engrossing his mind, before he found expression for it, in the painting "Heracles Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis," exhibited 1871. Many persons admired this work more than any that had previously appeared.[42] It evoked the lines from Browning:-- "I know, too, a great Kaunian painter, strong As Hercules, though rosy with a robe Of Grace that softens down the sinewy strength: And he has made a picture of it all. There lies Alcestis 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, 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; I pronounce that piece Worthy to set up in our Poikilé!" Leighton had taken the lines from Euripides as his text:-- "There slept a silent palace in the sun, With plains adjacent and Thessalian peace."