Lycidas

This composition derives from one of the paintings illustrating John Milton’s Paradise Lost (Tate Britain) that Fuseli created for his ill-fated Milton Gallery. Moses Haughton was Fuseli’s resident engraver at the time. In the original painting, the shepherd dreams, having been bewitched by the sound of music made by gambolling fairy elves (Book I, 781). Here, only the moon remains, and attention is drawn to the lines, ‘Under the opening eye-lids of the morn, What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn’.

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