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| Albert Joseph Moore Dreamers ca. 1882 oil on canvas Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, England |
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| Berthe Morisot The Basket Chair 1882 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
from COLONUS' PRAISE
Who comes into this country, and has come
Where golden crocus and narcissus bloom,
Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughter
And beauty-drunken by the water
Glittering among the grey-leaved olive-trees,
Has plucked a flower and sung her loss;
Who finds abounding Cephisus
Has found the loveliest spectacle there is.
Because this country has a pious mind
And so remembers that when all mankind
But trod the road, or splashed about the shore,
Poseidon gave it bit and oar,
Every Colonus lad or lass discourses
Of that oar and of that bit;
Summer and winter, day and night,
Of horses and horses of the sea, white horses.
– from Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, translated by William Butler Yeats (1928)
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| William Merritt Chase Study of Young Woman ca. 1883-87 oil on canvas Indianapolis Museum of Art |
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| Auguste Renoir View of a Park 1885 watercolor Morgan Library, New York |
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| Oswald Achenbach In the Park of the Villa Borghese, Rome 1886 oil on canvas Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf |
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| Willard Metcalf Sunlight and Shadow 1888 oil on panel Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
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| John Everett Millais Dew-drenched Furze 1889 oil on canvas Tate Britain |
THE FORTUNES OF MEN
Cassandra: Ah the fortunes of men! When they go well
A shadow sketch would match them, and in ill-fortune
The dab of a wet sponge destroys the drawing.
It is not myself but the life of man I pity.
– from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, translated by Louis MacNeice (1936)
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| John Singer Sargent An Out-of-doors Study 1889 oil on canvas Brooklyn Museum |
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| Thomas Wilmer Dewing The Hermit Thrush 1890 oil on canvas Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| Rupert Bunny Tritons 1890 oil on canvas Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney |
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| Rupert Bunny Sea Idyll ca. 1891 oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne |
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| Édouard Vuillard Woman in a striped dress 1895 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Camille Pissarro La Place du Théâtre Français 1898 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Eugène Jansson Riddarfjärden, Stockholm 1898 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
THE WAR AT TROY
Herald: These things have taken time.
Some of them we could say have fallen well,
While some we blame. Yet who except the gods
Is free from pain the whole duration of life?
If I were to tell of our labours, our hard lodging,
The sleeping on crowded decks, the scanty blankets,
Tossing and groaning, rations that never reached us --
And the land too gave matter for more disgust,
for our beds lay under the enemy's walls.
Continuous drizzle from the sky, dews from the marshes,
Rotting our clothes, filling our hair with lice.
And if one were to tell of the bird-destroying winter
Intolerable from the snows of Ida
Or of the heat when the sea slackens at noon
Waveless and dozing in a depressed calm –
But why make these complaints? The weariness is over;
Over indeed for some who never again
Need even trouble to rise.
Why make a computation of the lost?
Why need the living sorrow for the spites of fortune?
I wish to say a long goodbye to disasters.
– from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, translated by Louis MacNeice (1936)