The Oldest Existing Cello; Andrea Amati - “The King”, circa 1538 AD
(via odditiesoflife)
(Source: lovelyvintageladies, via victorianalexandratitanic)
Louise Brooks, 1920s
Ophelia; Sir John Everett Millais, 1851-1852The scene depicted is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act IV, Scene vii, in which Ophelia, driven out of her mind when her father is murdered by her lover Hamlet, drowns herself in a stream:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element; but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
(via odditiesoflife)
Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova of Russia look on as sailors march past, circa 1907.
(via fuckyeahimperialrussia)
"He delighted in her company and found, in her, qualities as necessary to him as the air he breathed. I saw him when she’d gone away for a fortnight. He was miserable, haggard, dejected Then I saw him when she’d been back a day or two, and he was a different man - gay, debonair, self- confident. Make no mistake: he can’t live without her."
— Winston Churchill on Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (via vintage-royalty)
Politics by William Butler Yeats
`In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in
political terms’ - Thomas Mann
HOW can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!
