Lines for a picture by Leighton [Eurydice to Orpheus]

First publ. in the catalogue of the Royal Academy exhibition of 1864 (The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts. MDCCCLXIV. The Ninety-Sixth,p. 13) as the motto for a picture by Frederic Leighton entitled ‘Eurydice and Orpheus’ (now in the Leighton House Museum; see plate 2). By a printer’s error the poem appeared as prose in the first print-run of the catalogue; the error was corrected in subsequent printings (see below). Repr. 1865, 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is the corrected version of 1864 (i.e. the exhibition catalogue), which B. is likely to have supervised; we accordingly adopt the three minor variants in this text, two of which (ll. 6, 7) may have been prompted by B. observing an unwanted syntactical ambiguity in the prose layout.