The altar fire by A.C. Benson

In one of the great windows of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, there is a panel the beauty of which used to strike me even as a boy. I used to wonder what further thing it meant.

It was, I believe -- I may be wholly wrong -- a picture of Reuben, looking in an agony of unavailing sorrow into the pit from which his brothers had drawn the boy they hated to sell him to the Midianites. I cannot recollect the details plainly, and little remains but a memory of dim-lit azure and glowing scarlet. Even though the pit was quaintly depicted as a draw-well, with a solid stone coping, the pretty absurdity of the thought only made one love the fancy better. But the figure of Reuben! -- even through an obscuring mist of crossing leads and window-bars and weather stains, there was a poignant agony wrought into the pose of the figure, with its clasped hands and strained gaze.