And now we come to Plate 14, than which nothing can be imagined more beautiful. “When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy,” are the words beneath and around the border; the six days of creation are indicated in six delicate medallions, which may in their turn have suggested the noble series of paintings, of ample scope and poetic imagining, which Sir Edward Burne-Jones executed.

[Larger Image]

PLATE XIV FROM “THE BOOK OF JOB,” 1825

Engraving

But the main design—God, the centre of the universe, from whom issues Day and Night, the listening rapt group of Job, his wife, and the comforters, and, above all, the glorious rejoicing ranks of angels—is beautiful almost beyond expression. It is noticeable that on either side appears the arm alone of an angel outside the picture, thus cleverly suggesting the idea of an infinity of this heavenly host. Mrs. Jamieson, in her “Christian Art,” says, “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 others.

“His adoring angels float rather than fly, and with their half-liquid draperies seem about to dissolve into light and love; and his rejoicing angels—behold them!—sending up their voices with the morning stars, that ‘singing in their glory move!’”

The picture has the thrill, the immensity of music in it, and I never look at it without recalling the motive of the last movement of the Choral Symphony.

It resolves all the human suffering, all the incoherent and striving emotions, all the diverse and multiform forces of the Book of Job, into a final harmony and triumph of beauty.