The Devil's Pool

The Devil's Pool

This quaint old French verse, written under one of Holbeins pictures, is profoundly melancholy. The engraving represents a laborer driving his plow through the middle of a field. Beyond him stretches a vast horizon, dotted with wretched huts; the sun is sinking behind the hill. It is the end of a hard days work. The peasant is old, bent, and clothed in rags. He is urging onward a team of four thin and exhausted horses; the plowshare sinks into a stony and ungrateful soil. One being only is active and alert in this scene of toil and sorrow. It is a fantastic creature. A skeleton armed with a whip, who acts as plowboy to the old laborer, and running along through the furrow beside the terrified horses, goads them on. This is the specter Death, whom Holbein has introduced allegorically into that series of religious and philosophic subjects, at once melancholy and grotesque, entitled The Dance of Death. In this collection, or rather this mighty composition, where Death, who plays his part on every page, is the connecting link and predominating thought, Holbein has called up kings, popes, lovers, gamesters, drunkards, nuns, courtesans, thieves, warriors, monks, Jews, and travelers,all the people of his time and our own; and everywhere the specter Death is among them, taunting, threatening, and triumphing. He is absent from one picture only, where Lazarus, lying on a dunghill at the rich mans door, declares that the specter has no terrors for him; probably because he has nothing to lose, and his existence is already a life in death. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 21993
Author: Sand, George
Release Date: Jul 4, 2007
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Illustrator: Abot, Eugène-Michel-Joseph, 1836-1894
Translator: Sedgwick, Ellery, 1872-1960, Sedgwick, Jane Minot