University of Virginia Library

This sonnet was suggested by the following passage out of Mrs Jameson's Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad, in a description she gives of a visit paid to the artist Retzsch, near Dresden:—“Afterwards he placed upon his easel a wonderous face, which made me shrink back—not with terror, for it was perfectly beautiful,—but with awe, for it was unspeakably fearful: the hair streamed back from the pale brow—the orbs of sight appeared at first two dark, hollow, unfathomable spaces, like those in a skull; but when I drew nearer and looked attentively, two lovely living eyes looked at me again out of the depth of the shadow, as if from the bottom of an abyss. The mouth was divinely sweet, but sad, and the softest repose rested on every feature. This, he told me, was the Angel of Death.”