For pure melody of line the next plate surpasses it, however. Enitharmon, fierce, beautiful, nude, descends in a cloud to awaken Orc, who lies face downward on the earth, the outline of his figure suggesting a young love-god rather than the fierce personality of the terrible Orc. Even the flames about his head might be those of love. The colour is very delicate and transparent.

Then follow two full-page interiors, which, in spite of the fine drawing and colour, oppress, with the uncomfortable sensation of confinement, airlessness! The fact is, that we are so accustomed to Blake’s open air windy wilds, and broad spaces of sky and cloud, that we do not feel at home with him when he takes us within doors.

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PLATE FROM “EUROPE, A PROPHECY,” 1794

Printed and coloured by hand

Another plate from the “Europe,” the lines of which we reproduce, represents two lithe nude women springing upwards with incomparable grace and the true Blake vigour, among arching wheat stems. They blow horns through which descends a fall of blight upon the corn. The decorative rightness, the exquisite appreciation of the melodies of form, the vitality of action, cannot be too much admired. And the colour! The tender flesh-painting contrasted with the young green of the corn!—Yet Mr. Swinburne, usually so intensely alive to the beautiful, and especially Blake’s beautiful, describes the plate in these terms: “Mildews are seen incarnate as foul, flushed women with strenuous limbs contorted, blighting ears of corn with the violent breath of their inflated mouths.”

There is some delicate tracery of cobwebs, among leaves and greenery, on another page, exhibiting Blake in a marvellously naturalistic mood for once, and a final plate of a man rescuing a woman and child from fierce, rolling flames. No one ever painted fire as Blake did, and over and over again in his treatment of this favourite motive we shall have to own that he is, as Mr. William Michael Rossetti says, in this respect at least, “supreme painter.”

As I do not know where to place the tiny book or pamphlet entitled, “There is no Natural Religion,”—it having no date affixed to it,—I shall refer to it here. It consists of eleven illustrated leaves, each containing in the engraved text a didactic statement or thesis by Blake on this favourite subject. Below the words, which give much illumination to his peculiar opinions, are small, rough drawings made with a brush full of heavy black, relieved in parts by outlines in sepia.