Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

And the more we looked, the more we studied, the more remarkable the picture appeared to us. The young, angry, and yet wicked face under the strange headdress, the nervous clasp of the left hand, while the right seizes the black veil, true to the instinct of some women, who, in the moment of their greatest joy or deepest grief, never forget their clothes! Eichard, with his winning courtesy and the bow which conceals the defects of his figure, in his red clothes, is a strange contrast to that other figure which we know, rather than see, lies stiff and cold behind the guards. Historically, perhaps, Richard looks a little old, as he was but thirty-five when killed on Bosworth field. The guards, the crowd, the varied ex- pressions fading actually away into the canvas, are very fine. The painting reminds one of the old Germans, and yet is entirely original. Is it not indeed in Art what 'Esmond' is in literature — an old story told in an old manner, and yet without absolute mimicry of anything ? And so the two old friends of forty years wandered on and began to get tired, when we met an acquaintance, and she said, ' Have you seen the picture that Mr. Watts in his generosity says is better painted than anything he ever did?' 'No, where is it? What is it?' '"The Leper's Wife," by George Harcourt, in the eleventh room.' And so on we went with renewed strength into this honoured eleventh room, and stood before one of the most dramatic and moving of modern pictures A splendid 294 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN young woman, of five-and-twenty or so, clothed in bright red, rushes with her face towards you through a wood, with outstretched arms, her face glowing with love and devotion, and her lips parted; behind her are great banks of cumuli, sanguine-stained from the setting sun, and the stems of the trees glow with the same light. Pure, small, white wood-flowers grow about her feet. All this to represent the joy and the pride of life, which she willingly leaves to join her leper husband, who stands in the dark shadow of his humble hut, clothed from head to foot in grey leper draperies, slightly recalling Mr. Watts's own beautiful figure of ' Love and Death ' — the head turned away, and the hand upheld forbidding her approach, unable to appreciate the love she brings him, or loving her too well to allow of any risk for her sake, though she cries : ' Kiss me, in the name of the everlasting God ! I will live and die with you ! ' The sacrifice could bring him no joy ; and so it will ever be, not only to the leper — for the love of men is not as the love of women. It seems impossible anyone should share our ignor- ance, so I will merely state that as the two old friends, who had led such different lives, stood entranced before the picture, we neither of us knew it was the illustration of a poem called ' Happy, or The Leper's Bride/ in Tennyson's last volume, 'Demeter and Other Poems.' He gives in a note an interesting account of the decision of the Church, in the twelfth century, that marriage was indissoluble, and that the lepers' wives might rejoin their husbands if they liked.