There is perhaps something to be said for this point of view. In the designs to the “Prophetic Books” his over-heated brain attempted the production in visible images of conceptions not matured—hints, scraps, vague but immense suggestions. His unfettered imagination set sail on a shoreless ocean of speculative thinking, and kept to no recognized course, made for no definite port. Roaming hither and thither on the wide dim sea of his ever-shifting thoughts, we sometimes long to see his imagination at work in a more limited, a more definite area.

And so when other minds circumscribed this area, giving him a central pole around which to group his ideas, we find no loss of individuality, no pale reflection of another’s conceptions, but a passionate concentration of original thinking on the subject prescribed, resulting in the development of an unsuspected point of view, a new aspect.

I am not speaking of illustrations such as those he executed as mere task-work to gain a living, like the engravings to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Stories, or those for Hayley’s Ballads. For these subjects had not enough matter, depth or scope to attract his thoughts or engage his sympathies. As illustrator to Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Virgil and the Book of Job, Blake worked with all his best and most characteristic powers under his command, and the more effective, vital and original for being concentrated.

In the same year in which he produced the last of the “London Books of Prophecy,” 1795, we find him illustrating a so-called translation of Bürger’s “Lenore.” In spite of the weakness and wilful inaccuracy of the English version, Blake seized with power on the spirit of the Teutonic legend, and gave the edition, a copy of which is in the Print Room (a quarto), three fine designs, of which the first is the most forceful.

We cannot linger over the designs which Hayley commissioned Blake to execute for his “Ballads on Animals.” From the engraver’s point of view they are specially fine, as the execution is very delicate, and reaches a state of high finish seldom attempted by Blake. Perhaps he wished to atone for paucity of inspiration by elaborate labour. Certain it is that he worked in bonds and trammels. The subjects were not interesting to him. Hayley might well say, in his lumberingly playful way, that “our good Blake was in labour with a young lion,” when he was engaged on the plate representing that animal. The labour was immense, for the conception had no vitality. Blake scourged his imagination into a degree of liveliness sufficient to make “the Horse” and “the Eagle” arresting and uncommon work, but the shackles were on his hands, because on his spirit, and he knew it.

Young’s “Night Thoughts,” which we take up next, bears the date 1797. Blake made no less than five hundred and thirty-seven water-colour drawings for this poem, but only forty-three designs were eventually selected for publication, and these were reproduced as uncoloured engravings. Till a short while ago, Mr. Bain of the Haymarket possessed the whole series of water-colour drawings, but they have now passed by purchase into the hands of an American collector. Through the kindness of Mr. Frederic Shields, who many years ago made tracings and copies from the unpublished designs, I am enabled to give reproductions of some of the most striking, though of course not in colour. (It will be remembered that Mr. Shields wrote the very powerful chapter on Young’s “Night Thoughts” which is included in the second volume of Gilchrist’s Life.) The designs published with the poem are larger than those we are accustomed to see in Blake’s books, and the disposition of them on the pages, of which the middle is occupied by the printed type enclosed in rectangular spaces, is not effective. We miss our artist’s beautiful fluent writing, and the type produces a bald staring impression on the beholder. When, too, the head and shoulders of a figure appear above the placard and the feet and legs below, as in one or two plates, we are irresistibly reminded of sandwich men. The want of colour also is a crying need in these large, pale, somewhat flat plates. The engravings are executed with great lightness, though with a certain monotony of line. They are slightly shaded, and have a distinguishing quality of purity and breadth. What luminous conceptions and stimulating fancies they contain! though it must also be admitted that there are a few plates which seem unworthy of Blake, being diffuse, tame, uninspired.

Plate 16 represents the “Aspiration of the Soul for Immortality” in a beautiful symbolic female figure holding a lyre and fluttering upward, but confined to the earth by chains around the ankles.

Plates 25 and 26 are, perhaps, the most tremendous in the book. In one Time creeps towards the spectator, while in the other he half-leaps, half-flies in his headlong course away.

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