Let us now go back a hundred years, to the time when William Blake was a fair-haired, smooth-browed boy, wandering aimlessly, after the manner of boys, about the streets of London. It might seem at first a matter of regret that a soul full of all glowing and glorious fancies should have been consigned to the damp and dismal dulness of that crowded city; but, in truth, nothing could be more fit. To this affluent, creative mind dinginess and dimness were not. Through the grayest gloom golden palaces rose before him, silver pavements shown beneath his feet, jewelled gates unfolded on golden hinges turning, and he wandered forth into a fair country. What need of sunshine and bloom for one who saw in the deepest darkness a "light that never was on sea or land?" Rambling out into the pleasant woods of Dulwich, through the green meadows of Walton, by the breezy heights of Sydenham, bands of Angels attend him. They walked between the toiling haymakers, they hovered above him in the apple-boughs, and their bright wings shone like stars. him there was neither awe nor mystery, only delight. Angels were no more unnatural than apples. But the honest hosier, his father, took different views. Never in all his life had that worthy citizen beheld angels perched on treetops, and he was only prevented from administering to his son a sound thrashing for the absurd falsehood by the intercession of his mother. Ah, these mothers! By what fine sense is it that they detect the nascent genius for which man's coarse perception can find no better name than perverseness, and no wiser treatment than brute force?

For

ascent, the young student had reached the vesti bule of the temple; but

"Every door was barred with gold, and opened but to golden keys,"

which, alas! to him were wanting. Nothing daunted, his sincere soul preferred to be a doorkeeper in the house of his worship rather than a dweller in the tents of Mammon. Unable to be an artist, he was content for the time to become an artisan, and chose to learn engraving-a craft which would keep him within sight and sound of the heaven from which he was shut out. Application was first made to Ryland, then in the zenith of his fame, engraver to the King, a friend of authors and artists, himself a graceful, accomplished, and agreeable gentleman. But the marvellous eyes that pierced through mortal gloom to immortal glory saw also the darkness that brooded behind uncanny light. "I do not like the man's face," said young Blake, as he was leaving the shop with his father; "it looks as if he will live to be hanged." The negotiation failed; Blake was apprenticed to Basire; and twelve years after, the darkness that had lain so long in ambush came out and hid the day: Ryland was hanged.

His new master, Basire, was one of those workmen who magnify their office and make it honourable. The most distinguished of four generations of Basires, engravers, he is represented as a superior, liberal-minded, upright man, and a kind master. With him Blake served out his seven years of apprenticeship, as faithful, painstaking, and industrious as any blockhead. So great was the confidence which he secured, that, month after month, and year after year, he was sent out alone to Westminster Abbey and the various old churches in the neighbourhood, to make drawings from the monuments, with no oversight but that of his own taste and his own conscience. And a rich reward we may well suppose his integrity brought him, in the charming solitudes of those old-time sanctuaries. Wandering up and down the consecrated aisles,-eagerly peering through the dim, religious light for the beautiful forms that had leaped from many a teeming brain now turned to dust,-reproducing, with patient hand, graceful outline and deepening shadow,-his daring, yet reverent heart held high communion with the ages that were gone. The Spirit of the Past overshadowed him. The grandeur of Gothic symbolism rose before him. of dead centuries murmured low music down the fretted vault, Fair ladies and brave gentlemen came up from the solemn chambers where they had lain so long in silent state, and smiled with their olden grace. Shades of nameless poets, who had wrought their souls into a cathedral and died unknown and unhonoured, passed before the dreaming boy, and But there came a time when Pegasus must be claimed their immortality. Nay, once the Blesbroken into drudgery, and travel along troddensed Face shone through the cloistered twilight, ways, By glow, it cannot be said by toilsome and the Twelve stood roundabout, In this

The boy had much reason to thank his mother, for to her intervention it was doubtless largely due that he was left to follow his bent, and haunt such picture-galleries as might be found in noblemen's houses and public sale-rooms. There he feasted his bodily eyes on earthly beauty, as his mental gaze had been charmed with heavenly visions. From admiration to imitation was but a step, and the little hands soon began to shape such rude, but loving copies as Rafaelle, with tears in his eyes, must have smiled to see. His father, moved by motherly persuasions, as we can easily infer, bought him casts for models, that he might continue his drawing-lessons at home; his own small allowance of pocket-money went for prints; his wistful child-face presently became known to dealers, and many a cheap lot was knocked down to him with amiable haste by friendly auctioneers. Then and there began that lifelong love and loyalty to the grand old masters of Germany and Italy, to Albrecht Dürer, to Michael Angelo, to Rafaelle, which knew no diminution, and which, in its very commencement, revealed the eclecticism of true genius, because the giants were not the gods in those days.

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was the current which caught up this simple-attended him with the most affectionate devohearted painter, this seer of unutterable things, tion, nor ever left the bedside till he beheld the this "eternal child"-caught him up only to disembodied spirit leave the frail clay, and soar drop him, with no creditable, but with very heavenward, clapping its hands for joy! credible haste. As a lion, he was undoubtedly His brother gone, though not so far away thrice welcome in Rathbone Place; but when it that he did not often revisit the old homewas found that the lion would not roar there friendly Flaxman in Italy, but more inaccessible gently, nor be bound by their silken strings, there than Robert in the heaven which lay above but rather shook his mane somewhat contemp- this man in his perpetual infancy-the bas-bleus tuously at his would-be tamers, and kept, in their reinclosed in the charmed circle in which Blake grand saloons, his freedom of the wilderness, had so riotously disported himself, a small athe was straightway suffered to return to his tempt at partnership, shopkeeping, and moneyfitting solitudes. One may imagine the con- making well-nigh "dead before it was born"sternation that would be caused by this young the poet began to think of publishing. The fellow turning to Mrs. Carter, whose "talk was verses of which we have spoken had been seen all instruction," or to Mrs. Chapone, bent on but by few people, and the store was constantly the "improvement of the mind," or to Miss increasing. Influence with the publishers, and Streatfield, with her " nose and notions à la money to defray expenses, were alike wanting. Grecque," and abruptly inquiring, "Madam, A copy of Lavater's " Aphorisms," translated did you ever see a fairy's funeral?" "Never, by his fellow-countryman Fuseli, had received sir!" responds the startled Muse. "I have," upon its margins various annotations which repursues Blake, as calmly as if he were pro-veal the man in his moods. "The great art to posing to relate a bon mot which he heard at love your enemy consists in never losing sight Lady Middleton's route last night. "I was of man in him," says Lavater. "None can walking alone in my garden last-night: there see the man in the enemy," pencils Blake. "If was great stillness among the branches and he is ignorantly so, he is not truly an enemy; if flowers, and more than common sweetness in maliciously so, not a man. I cannot love the air. I heard a low and pleasant sound, and my enemy, for my enemy is not a man, knew not whence it came. At last I saw the but a beast. And if I have any, I can love broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I him as a beast, and wish to beat him." No saw a procession of creatures of the size and equivocation here, surely. On superstition he colour of green and grey grasshoppers, bearing comments: "It has been long a bugbear, by a body laid out on a rose-leaf, which they buried reason of its having been united with hypocrisy. with songs, and then disappeared. It was a But let them be fairly separated, and then su fairy funeral." Or they are discussing, some- perstition will be honest feeling, and God, who what pompously, Herschel's late discovery of loves all honest men, will lead the poor enthuUranus, and the immense distance of heavenly siast in the path of holiness." Herein lies the bodies, when Blake bursts out uproariously, germ of a truth. Again, Lavater says: "A ""Tis false! I was walking down a lane the great woman not imperious, a fair woman not other day, and at the end of it I touched the vain, a woman of common talents not jealous, sky with my stick." Truly, for this wild man, an accomplished woman who scorns to shine, who obstinately refuses to let his mind be regu- are four wonders just great enough to be dilated, but bawls out his mad visions the louder vided among the four corners of the globe." the more they are combated, there is nothing Whereupon Blake adds: "Let the men do for it but to go back to his Kitty, and the little their duty, and the women will be such wontenement in Green-street. ders: the female life lives from the life of the male. See a great many female dependents, and you know the man." If this be madness, would that the madman might have bitten all mankind before he died! To the advice, "Take here the grand secret, if not of pleasing all, yet of displeasing none: court mediocrity, avoid originality, and sacrifice to fashion," he appends, with an evident reminiscence of Rathbone Place, "And go to hell,"

But real friends Blake found, who, if they could not quite understand him, could love and honour and assist. Flaxman, the "Sculptor for Eternity," and Fuseli, the fiery-hearted Swiss painter, stood up for him manfully. His own younger brother, Robert, shared his talents, and became for a time a loved and honoured member of his family-too much honoured, if we may credit an anecdote in which the brother appears to much better advantage But this private effervescence was not enough; than the husband. A dispute having one day and long thinking anxiously as to ways and arisen between Robert and Mrs. Blake, Mr. means, suddenly, in the night, Robert stood Blake, after awhile, deemed her to have gone before him, and revealed to him a secret by too far, and bade her kneel down and beg which a facsimile of poetry and design could be Robert's pardon, or never see her husband's produced. On rising in the morning, Mrs. face again. Nowise convinced, she neverthe-Blake was sent out with a half-crown to buy the less obeyed the stern command, and acknowledged herself in the wrong. "Young woman, you lie !" retorted Robert; "I am in the wrong!" This beloved brother died at the age of twenty five. During his last illness Blake

necessary materials, and with that he began an experiment which resulted in furnishing his principal means of support through life. It consisted in a species of engraving in relief both of the words and the designs of his poems, by a

horse how he shall take his prey." The remainder of the book consists of "Memorable Fancies," half-dream, half-allegory, sublime and grotesque inextricably commingling, but all ornamented with designs most daring and imaginative in conception, and steeped in the richest colour. We subjoin a description of one or two, as a curiosity. "A strip of azure sky surtitle-page, leaving on each side scant and baleful trees, little else than stem and spray. Drawn on a tiny scale lies a corpse, and one bends over it. Flames burst forth below and slant upward across the page, gorgeous with every hue. In their very core, two spirits rush together and embrace." In the seventh design is "a little island of the sea, where an infant springs to its mother's bosom. From the birth-cleft ground a spirit has half emerged. Below, with ancient man rushes at you, as it were, out of the page." The eleventh is "a surging of mingled fire, water, and blood, wherein roll the volumes of a huge, double fanged serpent, his crest erect, his jaws wide open." "The everfluctuating colour, the spectral pigmies rolling, flying, leaping among the letters, the ripe bloom of quiet corners, the living light and bursts of flame, the spires and tongues of fire vibrating with the full prism, make the page seem to move and quiver within its boundaries, and you lay the book down tenderly, as if you had been handling something sentient."

process peculiar and original. From his plates he printed off in any tint he chose, afterwards colouring up his designs by hand. Joseph, the sacred carpenter, had appeared in a vision, and revealed to him certain secrets of colouring. Mrs. Blake delighted to assist him in taking impressions, which she did with great skill, in tinting the designs, and in doing up the pages in boards so that everything, except manufac-mounts, and of land divides, the words of the turing the paper, was done by the poet and his wife. Never before, as his biographer justly remarks, was a man so literally the author of his own book. If we may credit the testimony that is given, or even judge from such proofs as Mr. Gilchrist's book can furnish, these works of his hands were exquisitely beautiful. The effect of the poems imbedded in their designs is, we are told, quite different from their effect set naked upon a blank page. It was as if he had transferred scenery and characters from that spirit-outstretched arms and hoary beard, an awful, realm where his own mind wandered at will; and from wondrous lips wondrous words came fitly, and with surpassing power. Confirmation of this we find in the few plates of "Songs of Innocence" which have been recovered. Shorn of the radiant rainbow hues, the golden sheen, with which the artist, angel-taught, glorified his pictures, they still body for us the beauty of his "Happy Valley." Children revel there in unchecked play. Springing vines, in wild exuberance of life, twine around the verse, thrusting their slender coils in among the lines. Weeping willows dip their branches into translucent pools; heavy-laden trees droop their ripe, rich clusters overhead. Under the shade of broad-spreading oaks little children climb on the tiger's yielding back and stroke the lion's tawny mane in a true Millennium.

The first series, "Songs of Innocence," was succeeded by "Songs of Experience," subsequently bound in one volume. Then came the book of "Thel," an allegory, wherein Thel, beautiful daughter of the Seraphim, laments the shortness of her life down by the River of Adona, and is answered by the Lily of the Valley, the Little Cloud, the Lowly Worm, and the Clod of Clay, the burden of whose song is

"But how this is, sweet maid, I know not, and I cannot know,

I ponder, and I cannot ponder: yet I live and love!"

We have not space to give a description, scarcely even a catalogue, of Blake's numerous works. Wild, fragmentary, gorgeous dreams. they are, tangled in with strange allegoric words and designs, that throb with their prisoned vitality. The energy, the might, the intensity of his lines and figures it is impossible for words to convey. It is power in the fiercest, most eager action-fire and passion, the madness and the stupor of despair, the frenzy of desire, the lurid depths of woe, that thrill and rivet you even in the comparatively lifeless rendering of this book. The mere titles of the poems give but a slight clue to their character. Ideas are upheaved in a tossing surge of words. It is a mystic, but lovely Utopia, into which "The Gates of Paradise" open. The practical name of "America" very faintly foreshadows the Ossianic Titans that glide across its pages, or the tricksy phantoms, the headlong spectres, the tongues of flame, the folds and fangs of symbolic serpents, that writhe and leap and dart and riot there. With a poem named Europe" we should scarcely expect for a frontispiece the Ancient of Days, in unapproached grandeur, setting his " compass upon the face of the Earth"-a vision revealed to the designer at the top of his own staircase.

Small favour and small notice these works secured from the public, which found more edification in the drunken courtship and brutal squabbles of "the First Gentleman of Europe" than in Songs of Innocence or Sculptures for Eternity. The poet's own friends constituted