"I'll drink of the clear stream,
And hear the linnet's song;
And there I'll lie and dream
The day along:
And, when night comes, I'll go
To places fit for woe;
Walking along the darkened valley
With silent Melancholy."
We pass over Blake's progress in his art, but may remark, from his biographer, that although he drew the Antique with great care, he thus early conceived a distaste for the study as pursued in Academies of Art. "Already 'life,'" says Mr. Gilchrist, "in so factitious, monotonous an aspect of it as that presented by a model artificially posed to enact an artificial part—to maintain in painful rigidity some fleeting gesture of spontaneous Nature's—became, as it continued, 'hateful,' looking to him, laden with thick-coming fancies, 'more like death' than life; nay (singular to say), 'smelling of mortality'—to an imaginative mind! 'Practice and opportunity,' he used afterwards to declare, 'very soon teach the language of art;' as much, that is, as Blake ever acquired, not a despicable if imperfect quantum. 'Its spirit and poetry, centred in the imagination alone, never can be taught; and these make the artist:' a truism, the fervid poet already began to hold too exclusively in view. Even at their best—as the vision-seer and instinctive Platonist tells us in one of the very last years of his life (MS. notes to Wordsworth)—mere 'Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me!'"
Blake wrote many songs, to which he also composed tunes, sometimes singularly beautiful; these he would occasionally sing to his friends. His later verse, which he attached to his plates, was very enigmatical. Though he did not for forty years attend any place of divine worship, yet he was not a Freethinker nor irreligious, as has been scandalously represented. The Bible was everything with him. How he reverenced the Almighty, the following conclusion of his address to the Deity will show:—
"For a tear is an intellectual thing;
And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King;
And the bitter groan of a martyr's woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow."
And in his Address to the Christians:—
"I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate,
Built in Jerusalem's wall."
Blake was a diligent and enthusiastic student. The day he devoted to the graver and the night to poetry; he was utterly indifferent to the goods of this life, and used to say: "My business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes expressing god-like sentiments."
When Blake was twenty-six years of age, he married Catherine Boutcher, who lived near his father's house, and was noticed by Blake for the whiteness of her hands, the brightness of her eyes, and a slim and handsome shape, corresponding with his own notions of sylphs and naiads. His marriage proved a mutually happy one. She had not learned to write, but Blake instructed his "beloved," as he most frequently called her, and allowed her till the last moments of his practice to take off his proof impressions and print his works, which she did most carefully, and ever delighted in the task; nay, she became a draughtswoman. And as a convincing proof that she and her husband were born for each other's comfort, she not only cheerfully entered into his views, but, what is curious, possessed a similar power of imbibing ideas, and produced drawings equally original, and in some respects, interesting. She almost rivalled him in all things, save in the power of seeing visions of any individual living or dead, whenever he chose to see them. Yet, she joined him in other extravagances. The painter and Mrs. Blake one day received a guest in their arbour in a state of nakedness, to whom they calmly declared that they were Adam and Eve!