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He was almost naked, except that he had a few rags round his loins; and the skin that hardly covered his bones was a mass of sores. His head was so deformed and his eyes so sunken that a Peruvian mummy would have been an Adonis if compared with him.
As she drew near and saw from on high his lifeless body bathed in blood, she alighted and, bending over it, beat her breast and tore her hair. Reproaching the Fates, she said, "Yet theirs shall be but a partial triumph; memorials of my grief shall endure, and the spectacle of your death, my Adonis, and of my lamentations shall be annually renewed.
Their Redeemer is descended by a fairly clear genealogy from the 'Tritos Sôtêr' of early Greece, contaminated with similar figures, like Attis and Adonis from Asia Minor, Osiris from Egypt, and the special Jewish conception of the Messiah of the Chosen people. He has various names, which the name of Jesus or 'Christos', 'the Anointed', tends gradually to supersede.
His Venus and Adonis seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those characters by the most consummate actors. You seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything.
Of the poesie there is then a new upspringing, a new efflorescence, and we get by the side of the Venus and Adonis, the Diana and Actæon, the Diana and Calisto, the Rape of Europa, such pieces of a more exquisite and penetrating poetry as the Venere del Pardo of Paris, and the Nymph and Shepherd of Vienna.
It would be idle, perhaps, to lay much weight on evidence drawn from the calendar of flowers, and in particular to press an argument so fragile as the bloom of the rose. Yet so far as it counts at all, the tale which links the damask rose with the death of Adonis points to a summer rather than to a spring celebration of his passion. In Attica, certainly, the festival fell at the height of summer.
Jacintha took it, bestowed a glance of undisguised admiration on the young Adonis, and carried it to the baroness. That lady sent her promptly down again with a black-edged note to this effect. Highly flattered by Monsieur de Riviere's visit, the baroness must inform him that she receives none but old acquaintances, in the present grief of the family, and of the KINGDOM.
"Besides," she thought, "whatever dilemma he might have in obtaining liquid assets, I'm a pauper in contrast. Maybe there is nothing to it at all but my own overactive imagination." She looked at him again. She saw the eyes of a man who yearned for money. She saw the eyes of Venus who would have said anything to woo Adonis, and she felt that his love for her, if it existed, was not good.
She probably needs a man's arm to reach the wary old Baronet in future. My lady writes in no uncertain tone." He carefully folded the note and bestowed it safely with the spoil of the young patrician. "Of course I must show up," he said as he betook himself to his tub whence he emerged shapely as an Adonis with the corded torso of an athlete.
As EURIPIDES is the most sententious among the Greek poets: so is WARNER among our English poets. As the soul of EUPHORBUS was thought to live in PYTHAGORAS: so the sweet witty soul of OVID lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued SHAKESPEARE. Witness his VENUS and ADONIS; his LUCRECE; his sugared Sonnets, among his private friends; &c.
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