19th Century Post

The Swan Princess - 1900

by Mikhail Alexandrovich Vrubel

(Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Are you -- Nobody -- Too?

Then there's a pair of us!

Don't tell! they'd advertise -- you know!

How dreary -- to be -- Somebody!

How public -- like a Frog --

To tell one's name -- the livelong June --

To an admiring Bog!

                                                            ~Emily Dickinson

Albaydé - 1848

by Alexandre Cabanel

(Musée Fabre,  Montpellier, France)

      "Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed."

                                                   ~Khalil Gibran

Demon Seated in a Garden - 1890

by Mikhail Vrubel

(Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)

Algernon Charles Swinburne

(Sketch by Dante Gabriel Rossetti)

Sorrow

SORROW, on wing through the world for ever,

Here and there for awhile would borrow

Rest, if rest might haply deliver

Sorrow.

One thought lies close in her heart gnawn thorough

With pain, a weed in a dried-up river,

A rust-red share in an empty furrow.

Hearts that strain at her chain would sever

The link where yesterday frets to-morrow:

All things pass in the world, but never

Sorrow.

                                                ~Algernon Charles Swinburne

Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom - 1876

by Ilya Yefimovich Repin

(The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg)

 "It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect."     

                                                                                                     ~John Ruskin