508 APPENDIX TO PART II

The sage; for Death design’d to be conceal’d.

He gave an old vivacious usurer

His meagre aspect and his naked bones;

In gratitude for plumping up his prey,

A pamper’d spendthrift; whose fantastic air,

Well-fashion’d figure, and cockaded brow,

He took in change, and underneath the pride

Of costly linen, tuck’d his filthy shroud.

His crooked bow he straighten’d to a cane;

And hid his deadly shafts in Myra’s eyes.”¹

The other plate, “Death the Friend,” showed the grotesque in its gentler power of teaching. The old sexton sits quietly in his chair beneath the belfry, at the window of the church tower; the summer evening is falling-Death has come for him, his lean and ghostly horse is waiting in the clouds; and he stands and tolls at once the vesper and the passing bell, while a little bird on the window-sill sings as the good man dies. The whole is full of that poetry and that feeling which were so characteristic of the thirteenth-century art, of the period when Walter, the Minnesinger, left this charge in his testament, “Let the little birds be fed daily on my grave.”²

¹ [Night Thoughts, v. 846-859. For Ruskin’s constant reading of Young, see Vol. X. p. 405 n.]

² [Herr Walter von der Vogelweide (about 1190-1240), Walter of the bird-meadow; see Lays of the Minnesingers (by Edgar Taylor, 1825, p. 213). See Longfellow’s poem “Walter von der Vogelweide”:-

“And he gave the monks his treasures,

Gave them all with this behest:

They should feed the birds at noontide

Daily on his place of rest.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]