Born, in London, 28 Nov. 1757. To drawing school, 1767. Began to write verse, 1768. Apprenticed to J. Basire, engraver to Soc. of Antiquaries, 1771–78. Student in Royal Academy, 1778. Engraved for magazines and books. Married Catharine Sophia Boucher, 18 Aug. 1782. Opened printseller’s shop in Broad Street, 1784. Exhibited at R. A. same year. Shop given up, 1787. At Felpham, 1800–04. Returned to London. Exhibited for last time at R. A. 1808. Died, 12 Aug. 1827. Buried at Bunhill Fields, Finsbury. Works: [all engraved and coloured by hand unless otherwise stated]; “Poetical Sketches” (printed), 1783; “Songs of Innocence” (with assistance of his wife), 1789; “Book of Thel,” 1789; “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” 1790; “French Revolution” (printed), 1791; “Prospectus,” 1793; “Gates of Paradise,” 1793; “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” 1793; “America,” 1793; “Europe,” 1794; “The Book of Urizen,” 1794; “Songs of Experience,” 1794; “The Song of Los,” 1795; “The Book of Ahania,” 1795; “Jerusalem,” 1804; “Milton,” 1804; “Descriptive Catalogue” (printed), 1809. Collected Works: Poems, edited by R. H. Shepherd, 1868; by W. M. Rossetti (Aldine Series), 1874; Works, in facsimile of original editions, 1876. Life: by Gilchrist, 2nd ed. 1880.

Personal

  Blake is a real name, I assure you, and a most extraordinary man, if he be still living. He is the Robert Blake, whose wild designs accompany a splendid folio edition of the “Night Thoughts,” which you may have seen…. He paints in water colours marvellous strange pictures, visions of his brain, which he asserts that he has seen. They have great merit. He has seen the old Welsh bards on Snowdon—he has seen the Beautifullest, the strongest, and the Ugliest Man, left alone from the Massacre of the Britons by the Romans, and has painted them from memory (I have seen his paintings), and asserts them to be as good as the figures of Raphael and Angelo, but not better, as they have precisely the same retro-visions and prophetic visions with themself (himself). The painters in oil (which he will have it that neither of them practised) he affirms to have been the ruin of art, and affirms that all the while he was engaged in his Water paintings, Titian was disturbing him, Titian the Ill Genius of Oil Painting. His Pictures—one in particular, the Canterbury Pilgrims (far above Stothard’s)—have great merit, but hard, dry, yet with grace. He has written a Catalogue of them with a most spirited criticism on Chaucer, but mystical and full of Vision…. The man is flown, whither I know not—to Hades or a Mad House. But I must look on him as one of the most extraordinary persons of the age.

  Blake is an engraver by trade, a painter and poet also, whose works have been subjects of derision to men in general, but he has a few admirers, and some of eminence have eulogized his designs. He has lived in obscurity and poverty, to which the constant hallucinations in which he lives have doomed him. I do not mean to give you a detailed account of him; a few words will serve to inform you of what class he is. He is not so much a disciple of Jacob Boehme and Swedenborg as a fellow-visionary. He lives as they did, in a world of his own, enjoying constant intercourse with the world of spirits. He receives visits from Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Voltaire, &c., and has given me repeatedly their very words in their conversations. His paintings are copies of what he sees in his visions. His books (and his MSS. are immense in quantity) are dictations from the spirits. A man so favoured, of course, has sources of wisdom and truth peculiar to himself. I will not pretend to give you an account of his religious and philosophical opinions; they area strange compound of Christianity, Spinozism, and Platonism.

  She [Mrs. Blake] would get up in the night, when he was under his very fierce inspirations, which were as if they would tear him asunder, while he was yielding himself to the Muse, or whatever else it could be called, sketching and writing. And so terrible a task did this seem to be, that she had to sit motionless and silent, only to stay him mentally, without moving hand or foot: this for hours, and night after night.

  Blake, once known, could never be forgotten. His knowledge was various and extensive, and his conversation so nervous and brilliant, that, if recorded at the time, it would now have thrown much light upon his character, and in no way lessened him in the estimation of those who knew him only by his works. In him you saw at once the Maker, the Inventor; one of the few in any age: a fitting companion for Dante. He was energy itself, and shed around him a kindling influence; an atmosphere of life, full of the ideal. To walk with him in the country was to perceive the soul of beauty through the forms of matter; and the high gloomy buildings between which, from his study window, a glimpse was caught of the Thames and the Surrey shore, assumed a kind of grandeur from the man dwelling near them. Those may laugh at this who never knew such an one as Blake; but of him it is the simple truth. He was a man without a mask; his aim single, his path straightforwards, and his wants few; so he was free, noble, and happy. His voice and manner were quiet, yet all awake with intellect. Above the tricks of littleness, or the least taint of affectation, with a natural dignity which few would have dared to affront, he was gentle and affectionate, loving to be with little children, and to talk about them.

  Mr. Butts was no believer in Blake’s “madness.” Strangers to the man, and they alone, believed in that. Yet he could give piquant accounts for his protégé’s extravagances. One story in particular he was fond of telling, which has been since pretty extensively retailed about town. At the end of the little garden in Hercules Buildings there was a summer-house. Mr. Butts calling one day found Mr. and Mrs. Blake sitting in this summer-house, freed from “those troublesome disguises” which have prevailed since the Fall. “Come in!” cried Blake; “it’s only Adam and Eve, you know!” Husband and wife had been reciting passages from “Paradise Lost,” in character, and the garden of Hercules Buildings had to represent the Garden of Eden: a little to the scandal of wondering neighbours, on more than one occasion. However, they knew sufficient of the single-minded artist not wholly to misconstrue such phenomena.

	He came to the desert of London town,
	Grey miles long;
	He wander’d up and he wander’d down,
	Singing a quiet song.
	He came to the desert of London town,
	Mirk miles broad;
	He wander’d up and he wander’d down,
	Ever alone with God.
	There were thousands and thousands of human kind
	In this desert of brick and stone:
	But some were deaf and some were blind,
	And he was there alone.
	At length the good hour came; he died,
	As he had lived, alone:
	He was not miss’d from the desert wide,—
	Perhaps he was found at the Throne.

  I was much with him from 1810 to 1816, when I came abroad, and have remained in Italy ever since. I might have learned much from him. I was then a student of the Royal Academy, in the antique school, where I gained a medal, and thought more of form than anything else. I was by nature a lover of colour, and my beau ideal was the union of Phidias and Titian. Blake was the determined enemy of colourists, and his drawing was not very academical. His high qualities I did not prize at that time; besides, I thought him mad. I do not think so now. I never suspected him of imposture. His manner was too honest for that. He was very kind to me, though very positive in his opinion, with which I never agreed. His excellent old wife was a sincere believer in all his visions. She told me seriously one day, “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.” She prepared his colours, and was as good as a servant. He had no other.

	This is the place. Even here the dauntless soul,
	The unflinching hand, wrought on; till in that nook,
	As on that very bed, his life partook
	New birth, and passed. Yon river’s dusky shoal,
	Whereto the close-built coiling lanes unroll,
	Faced his work-window, whence his eyes would stare,
	Thought-wandering, unto nought that met them there,
	But to the unfettered irreversible goal.
	This cupboard, Holy of Holies, held the cloud
	Of his soul writ and limned; this other one,
	His true wife’s charge, full oft to their abode
	Yielded for daily bread the martyr’s stone,
	Ere yet their food might be that Bread alone,
	The words now home-speech of the mouth of God.

  Now, this much is certain: that plain, commonplace, sober men, well acquainted with Blake in ordinary intercourse, saw in him one of themselves; that clever, shrewd, intelligent men thought him odd, but quite rational; and that men of high powers in art and literature, scholars, and sages of various schools, unanimously pronounced him sane. The evidence of his contemporaries is great in amount, and unvarying in substance. No one knew Blake, and thought him mad.

Art

  My friend Mr. D’Israeli possesses the largest collection of any individual of the very extraordinary drawings of Mr. Blake; and he loves his classical friends to disport with them, beneath the lighted Argand lamp of his drawing room, while soft music is heard upon the several corridors and recesses of his enchanted staircase. Meanwhile the visitor turns over the contents of the Blakëan portefeuille. Angels, Devils, Giants, Dwarfs, Saints, Sinners, Senators, and Chimney Sweeps, cut equally conspicuous figures: and the Concettos at times border upon the burlesque, or the pathetic, or the mysterious. Inconceivably blest is the artist, in his visions of intellectual bliss. A sort of golden halo envelopes every object impressed upon the retina of his imagination; and (as I learn) he is at times shaking hands with Homer, or playing the pastoral pipe with Virgil. Meanwhile, shadowy beings of an unearthly form hang over his couch, and disclose to him scenes … such as no other Mortal hath yet conceived! Mr. Blake is himself no ordinary poet.

  These, of any series of designs which art has produced, are the most purely elevated in their relation and sentiment. It would be long to discriminate the position they hold in this respect, and at the same time the disregard in which they may be held by some who judge of them in a material relation; while the great beauty which they possess will at once be apparent to others who can appreciate their style in its immaterial connexion. But the sum of the whole in my mind is this: that these designs reach the intellectual or infinite in an abstract significance, more entirely unmixed with inferior elements and local conventions than any others; that they are the result of high intelligence of thought, and of a progress of art through many styles and stages of different times, produced through a bright generalizing and transcendental mind.

  The most original, and, in truth, the only new and original version of the Scripture idea of angels which I have met with, is that of William Blake, a poet-painter, somewhat mad, as we are told, if indeed his madness were not rather “the telescope of truth,” a sort of poetical clairvoyance, bringing the unearthly nearer to him than to others.

  Blake, no doubt, imported into the Bible a crowd of fantastic ideas that sprang from his own fertile, impetuous brain. He went to it for a revelation of facts, and seized chiefly upon those which other men were trying their best to be rid of. He was orientalized both by the Bible and by his passion for large, swelling conceptions of life, death and immortality. By degrees he peopled his mind with a strange crowd of figures, many with biblical outlines, many also, jostling these,—variations upon a few simple themes. The elemental facts of life, as has already been said, were those which were most luminous to him and for which he found visible shapes, which were repeated constantly in his designs.

  If Blake was not a great master, he had in him certain elements that go to the making of one. Often these were beyond his own control. One does not need to be a painter or a poet to see, in his extraordinary work, that he frequently was the servant rather than the master; that he was swept away, like his own Elijah, by the horses and chariot of fire, and that when, like Paul, he reached the third heaven—whether he was in the body or out of it, he could not tell. This was not so at all times. The conception and execution of his “Job” are massive, powerful, sublime, maintained throughout the series. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is a wonderful, a fearlessly imaginative, production. But much of his labor with pen or pencil does not show that union of genius with method which declares the master. He does not always sit above the thunder; he is enrapt, whirled, trembling in the electric vortex of a cloud.

  Blake, as an artist, is a more important figure than Blake the poet; and naturally so, for the smallest good poem involves a consecutiveness and complexity of thought which are required in paintings only of a character which Blake rarely attempted. Yet, even as a painter his reputation has until lately been much exaggerated. That exhibition of his collected drawings and paintings was a great blow to the fame which had grown up from a haphazard acquaintance by his admirers with a few sketches or an illustrated poem. Here and there there was a gleam of such pure and simple genius as is often revealed in the speech of a finely-natured child amid its ordinary chatter; here and there the expression of a tender or distempered dream which was not like anything else in the spectator’s experience; now and then an outline that had a look of Michael Angelo, with sometimes hints which might have formed the themes of great works, and which justified the saying of Fuseli that “Blake is damned good to steal from;” but the effect of the whole collection was dejecting and unimpressive, and did little towards confirming its creator’s opinion that Titian, Reynolds, and Gainsborough were bad artists, and Blake, Barry, and Fuseli good ones.

  In art his aim was not merely to excite and satisfy the æsthetic sense; it was to move and instruct—to elevate the soul above its mundane surroundings—to create a desire for that life of the imagination in which alone “all things exist.” If that end were accomplished, all was accomplished…. His faculty of invention was supreme…. It remains for ever true that as regards what is commonly known as creative works, in that, namely, wherein the imagination reigns supreme, there have been few to equal and none to excel Blake among our English artists.

Poetry

  Good William Blake, the hosier’s son, the prophet of Carnaby Market, Golden Square, a most poetic dreamer, an enthusiast of more than Swedenborgian calibre, and a poet of no mean order; for he anticipated Wordsworth, rivalled our old dramatists in sustained majesty and dignity, and at times vied with Shelley in nervous fire.

  Having spoken so far of Blake’s influence as a painter, I should be glad if I could point out that the simplicity and purity of his style as a lyrical poet had also exercised some sway. But, indeed, he is so far removed from ordinary apprehensions in most of his poems, or more or less in all, and they have been so little spread abroad, that it would be impossible to attribute to them any decided place among the impulses which have directed the extraordinary mass of poetry displaying power of one or another kind, which has been brought before us from his day to our own. Perhaps some infusion of his modest and genuine beauties might add a charm even to the most gifted works of our present rather redundant time.

  From his childhood, Poetry walked hand in hand with Painting, and beguiled his loneliness with wild, sweet harmonies. Bred up amid the stately, measured, melodious platitudes of the eighteenth century, that Golden Age of commonplace, he struck down through them all with simple, untaught, unconscious directness, and smote the spring of ever-living waters. Such wood-notes wild as trill in Shakspeare’s verse sprang from the stricken chords beneath his hand. The little singing-birds that seem almost to have leaped unbidden into life among the gross creations of those old Afreets who

	“Stood around the throne of Shakspeare,
	Sturdy, but unclean,”

carolled their clear, pure lays to him, and left a quivering echo. Fine, fleeting fantasies we have, a tender, heartfelt, heart-reaching pathos, laughter that might at any moment tremble into tears, eternal truths, draped in the garb of quaint and simple story, solemn fervors, subtile sympathies, and the winsomeness of little children at their play,—sometimes glowing with the deepest color, often just tinged to the pale and changing hues of a dream, but touched with such coy grace, modulated to such free, wild rhythm, suffused with such a delicate, evanishing loveliness, that they seem scarcely to be the songs of our tangible earth, but snatches from fairy-land. Often rude in form, often defective in rhyme, and not unfrequently with even graver faults than these, their ruggedness cannot hide the gleam of the sacred fire.

  Confidence in future friends, and contempt of present foes, may have induced him to leave his highest achievements impalpable and obscure. Their scope is as wide and as high as heaven, but not as clear; clouds involve and rains inundate the fitful and stormy space of air through which he spreads and plies an indefatigable wing. There can be few books in the world like these; I can remember one poet only whose work seems to me the same or similar in kind; a poet as vast in aim, as daring in detail, as unlike others, as coherent to himself, as strange without and as sane within. The points of contact and sides of likeness between William Blake and Walt Whitman are so many and so grave, as to afford some ground of reason to those who preach the transition of souls or transfusion of spirits…. No man so poor and so obscure as Blake appeared in the eyes of his generation ever did more good works in a more noble and simple spirit. It seems that in each of these men at their birth pity and passion, and relief and redress of wrong, became incarnate and innate. That may well be said of the one which was said of the other: that “he looks like a man.” And in externals and details the work of these two constantly and inevitably coheres and coincides.

  “All deities reside in the human breast.” This should be taken as the keystone of Blake’s splendid arch. It is necessary again and again to recur to this, for there are some writings of his, especially the later, where he seems to have fallen into the hands of the Nemesis that pursues mysticism, and surrendered himself to the dangerous idea that his thoughts were personal spirits. As Cicero feared that the populace might, in course of time, believe that the statues of the gods are the gods themselves, there is always a peril besetting the imagination when introduced into religious speculations that it will confuse the planes of substance and form; of which Swedenborg is the saddest example, and Blake came too near being another.

  We are far from intending to disparage the real merits of these verses. Imitative to the verge of plagiarism as they are, they are often so skilfully composed, and relieved by such graceful touches of fancy and sweet snatches of melody, as to confer genuine pleasure in defiance of critical analysis. Here Blake’s artistic power makes itself felt, nor need we grudge him the praise that belongs to it because his panegyrists perversely claim for him honours to which he is not entitled. It was most creditable to his taste that he rejected the inferior models of contemporary poetry in favour of the great masters, but from the pother that Mr. Gilchrist and Mr. Swinburne make about it, one would suppose that he was the only one of his generation who manifested such sympathy. In fact, his was an age of poetic revival, and he did but worship at shrines newly set up by others.

  It is to these essays of his youth and early manhood that we must look for the true sources of his fame. The “Poetical Sketches,” begun when the author was only twelve years of age, and finished when he was no more than twenty, must assuredly be reckoned among the most extraordinary examples of youthful production; and it is profoundly characteristic of the man and his particular cast of mind that many of these boyish poems are among the best that Blake at any time produced. For his was a nature that owed little to development or experience. The perfect innocence of his spirit, as it kept him safe from the taint of the world, also rendered him incapable of receiving that enlargement of sympathy and deepening of emotion which others differently constituted may gain from contact with actual life. His imagination was not of the kind that could deal with the complex problems of human passion; he retained to the end of his days the happy ignorance as well as the freshness of childhood: and it is therefore perhaps less wonderful in his case than it would be in the case of a poet of richer and more varied humanity that he should be able to display at once and in early youth the full measure of his powers. But this acknowledgment of the inherent limitation of Blake’s poetic gift leads us by a natural process to a clearer recognition of its great qualities. His detachment from the ordinary currents of practical thought left to his mind an unspoiled and delightful simplicity which has perhaps never been matched in English poetry.

  We do not believe that the merely intelligent beholder, capable of admiring beauty and loving poetry, but without any settled creed in art or foregone conclusion, would ever of his own accord find in Blake the wonderful genius and grandeur with which it is now usual to credit him. Here and there he produces something by a sort of accidental inspiration, as in the beautiful creation, full of heavenly joy and beauty, of the “Morning stars singing together,” by which the most insensible must be moved. But it is unfortunate that his exponents should strain their demands so far as to require us to applaud in an equal degree all those weird outlines flung about the windy skies, all the crouching horrors and staring wild apparitions which mope and gibber in so many of his extraordinary pages.

  From this lack of early discipline to some extent may be ascribed the premature development of his marvellous imaginative faculty—his somewhat powerful self-assertive spirit—and his early dalliance with the muses; for he was scarcely out of the years of infancy before he began to write verse, and one of the very loveliest lyrics in the English tongue was produced by Blake before he was fourteen years old. It is merely entitled “A Song,” and runs thus—

“How sweet I roamed from field to field.”…

Talk of inspiration!—if the boy who produced that was not inspired, then who in any age ever was? For airiness, brightness, and suggestiveness, we have only a very few such lyrics; but it is remarkable that one of those few was also produced by another “marvellous boy” at about the same age that the hosier’s son was when he produced this. The poem referred to is entitled “To Helen,” and its writer was Edgar Allan Poe.

  Blake’s poetry, with the exception of four or five lovely lyrics and here and there in the other pieces a startling gleam of unquestionable genius, is mere drivel. A sensible person can easily distinguish between that which he cannot understand and that in which there is nothing to be understood.

  If we wish to understand Blake as a poet, we must discard his Ossianic and prophetic aberrations, and read him as we would any other poet, not when he is at his worst, but when he is at his best, in his “Songs of Innocence,” and “Songs of Experience,” which was published five years later. Here we find a poet who differed from all his contemporaries, who had no predecessor, and has had no successor, but who was altogether unique, original and individual, primitive and elemental. The qualities which distinguish his verse at this time were simplicity and sincerity, sweetness and grace, an untutored, natural note which reminds one of the singing of a child who croons to himself in his happy moments, not knowing how happy he is, wise beyond his years, superior to time or fate. They seem never to have been written, but to have written themselves, they are so frank and joyous, so inevitable and final.

  Happily were they called “Songs of Innocence!” If birds and babes and little children were able to put the delights of their hearts into words and utter speech, it would, one imagines, take the form of Blake’s songs; and if the young poet, unable to comprehend and translate their inarticulate lispings for himself, will but go to this man with the visionary eye, he will find in him their truest interpreter. Probably no true lover of poetry ever failed to be deeply impressed by the striking beauty of these poems. Their charm is in their childlike simplicity. Coming upon them for the first time is like chancing upon a scene of rural beauty, wherein children roam at play and call angels their parents.

  The poems of Blake appear the simplest in the world; they treat of the most ordinary subjects; but suddenly a deeper note, an allusion to hidden sufferings and wounds, reveals to us that we are not in the presence of a shepherd who pipes, but of a prophet who knows. The effect is grand and strange. Placed on the limit of two centuries, and on the boundary line of two periods, Blake is the first in date (but the least in genius) of that group of mysterious and symbol-loving poets, amongst whom are to be ranked Shelley, Rossetti, and Browning.

  Indeed it must be owned that a singer of so faulty an ear, and a writer of so shaky a grammar as Blake, was hardly well equipped for a pioneer of literary reform. Even now a considerable amount of the little that Blake has left must be rejected by the impartial critic as neither poetry nor sense; but the high poetical quality, the exquisite charm and freshness of the residue, is not to be denied. The affinity of his highest work with that of Wordsworth’s best is as striking as the resemblance of the two poets at their respective flattest is amusing. He anticipated the creator of Betty Foy, not in his noble simplicities alone, but in his irritating puerilities also. If he led the way for Wordsworth up the steep of Parnassus, he as certainly preceded him down the slope on the other side into the valley of Bathos. Blake’s lack of humour seems to have been as complete as Wordsworth’s, and in the elder poet there are lines of sudden descent into prose which startle us almost like a prophetic parody of the younger.

  Blake, in spite of the extravagant claims made for him by his admirers, must be held to have been primarily an artist. If he had not been an artist his poems could hardly have survived at all…. Blake’s poetry is, from beginning to end, childish; it has the fresh simplicity, but also the vapid deficiencies of its quality—the metre halts and is imperfect; the rhymes are forced and inaccurate, and often impress one with the sense that the exigencies of assonance are so far masters of the sense, that the word that ends a stanza is obviously not the word really wanted or intended by the author, but only approximately thrown out at it.

  The little poems in the “Songs of Innocence,” on infancy and first motherhood, and on subjects like the “Lamb,” are without rival in our language for simplicity, tenderness, and joy. The “Songs of Experience” give the reverse side of the “Songs of Innocence,” and they see the evil of the world as a child with a man’s heart would see it—with exaggerated horror. This small but predictive work of Blake, coming where it did, between 1777 and 1794, going back to Elizabethan lyrics and forward to those of Wordsworth, is very remarkable.

  The present writer deliberately ranks him as the greatest and most delectable poet of the eighteenth century proper in England, reserving Burns as specially Scotch.

  This philosophy kept him more simply a poet than any poet of his time, for it made him content to express every beautiful feeling that came into his head without troubling about its utility or chaining it to any utility…. When one reads Blake, it is as though the spray of an inexhaustible fountain of beauty was blown into our faces, and not merely when one reads “The Songs of Innocence,” or the lyrics he wished to call “The Ideas of Good and Evil;” but when one reads those “Prophetic Works” in which he spoke confusedly and obscurely because he spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models in the world about him. He was a symbolist who had to invent his symbols; and his counties of England, with their correspondence to tribes of Israel, and his mountains and rivers, with their correspondence to parts of a man’s body, are arbitrary as some of the symbolism in the “Axël” of the symbolist Villiers de l’Isle Adam is arbitrary, while they have an incongruity that “Axël” has not. He was a man crying out for a mythology, and trying to make one because he could not find one to his hand.

  He was the first poet of child life, and his work is fresh and strong with the angel music of babyhood. He never attempted complex problems, but forever gave himself to reflecting with grace and simplicity the effects of beauty which impress the untutored child.

General

  His Design can ill be translated into words, and very inadequately by any engraver’s copy. Of his Poems, tinged with the very same ineffable qualities, obstructed by the same technical flaws and impediments—a semi-utterance as it were, snatched from the depths of the vague and unspeakable—of these remarkable Poems, never once yet fairly placed before the reading public, specimens shall by-and-bye speak more intelligibly for themselves. Both form part in a Life and Character as new, romantic, pious—in the deepest natural sense—as they: romantic, though incident be slight; animated by the same unbroken simplicity, the same high unity of sentiment.

  During the last six years Blake has been a “fancy” with many people who had before hardly known his name; but the peculiar characteristics of his genius are such as to make him “caviare to the general.” With two classes, however, he is likely to hold a high place permanently: with the mystics, as the most spiritual, intense, and imaginative of English mystics; and with artists, and true lovers of art, as painter and poet, with a genius of a curiously individual stamp, and as pure and lofty as it was original. Among modern artists, Blake forms a class by himself. With great inequalities, alike in conception and execution, his work is instinct with a spirit which distinguishes it from that of any of his predecessors or contemporaries. “William Blake, his mark,” ineffaceably stamps every production of his pencil or his pen. In his highest reach of imagination he has never been surpassed; in the perfection of his technical execution at its best he is one of the great masters.

  In Blake, more than most, the man is identified with the artist; the spell which the life holds over the sympathetic reader is renewed and confirmed by the poet-painter’s designs and verses. The drawing may be often faulty; the syntax imperfect; yet there is a subtle simplicity, a tenderness springing equally from the heart and the imagination,—sometimes a sublimity of idea, which give the best work of Blake’s youth a peculiar place of its own, high up amongst our “treasures for ever.” The soul of that child-like and celestial painter Fra Angelico, might have entered into Blake (who in 1789 can have known nothing of the monastic Italian artist)—when writing this and the two following pieces for his “Songs of Innocence.”

  Now that there is a movement in London to form a (William) Blake Society, on the lines of the Shelley and the Browning Societies, there will probably be something of the sort here. There is nobody on the face of the earth who could better serve as the centre of a Boston craze than William Blake. He was great enough to be utterly misunderstood; he wrote a good deal that is so absolutely incomprehensible to everybody that the wayfaring man, though a fool, cannot lack abundant excuse for all sorts of new and fantastic “interpretations” of it, while there is still enough that is beautiful and sublime, and at the same time intelligible, to hold the sensible, who are the saving salt of these societies. The fact that the Boston Art Museum has just accumulated the original Blake water-colors brought over here by Mr. Quaritch is an additional fact which may be counted upon as having some weight, and I live in hope that we may next winter have the amusement of a Blake Society, with all the exquisite fooling that this implies.

  Looking back through the years that have passed since his death, no more remarkable a figure in poetry or painting can be discerned.

  His work of all kinds is surprising in its inequality. In some fragments of his verse—for instance, like the lines to “The Evening Star”—there are passages of such perfection as are not to be matched by any poet of the eighteenth century. On the other hand, much of it is unintelligible, some of it absolutely absurd. So, too, of his drawing; part is graceful, brilliant and effective; part incoherent and violent, and even grotesque. His methods, too, were equally various. Thus his “Songs of Experience” were executed in a most extraordinary manner, which he explained as the result of a direct revelation from his brother Robert, in a vision of the night. He used all kinds of pigments without oil, including metallic gold and silver, and with singular success.