His back to earth, his face to heaven,
Fall’n Hassan lies—his unclosed eye
Yet lowering on his enemy,
As if the hour that seal’d his fate
Surviving left his quenchless hate;
And o’er him bends that foe with brow
As dark as his that bled below.”
The artist had indeed well represented the fearful tragedy; the principal light in the painting fell upon the figure, and especially the face of the prostrate Hassan, which convulsed by the death agony, yet glanced with an expression of “quenchless hate” upon his destroyer. The features of the Giaour, owing to the position in which he stood, with one foot planted on the breast of his fallen enemy, were not visible, but his figure was tall and commanding, and his attitude in the highest degree expressive of triumphant power. Leaning against the same easel stood the companion picture—it contained but a single figure, but it was one which being seen, it was scarcely possible to forget, such a living embodiment did it present of hopeless despair. The stony eye, the sunken cheek, the stern yet spiritless mouth—all spoke of one who had indeed “nothing left to love or hate,” all realised the painful description of “the vacant bosom’s wilderness,” that paralysis of the soul in which
“The keenest pangs the wretched find
Are rapture to the dreary void,