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308 the nineteenth century, found a home in the ruins of ancient and consummated Churches, and imbued itself with the superficial obscurity and ghastliness, far more than with the inward grandeur of primeval times. For the true Inward is one and identical, and if Blake had been disposed to see it, he would have found that it was still (though doubtless under a multitude of wrappages) extant in the present age. On the contrary, copying the outward form of the past, he has delivered to us a multitude of new hieroglyphics, which contain no presumable reconditeness of meaning, and which we are obliged to account for, simply by the artist's having yielded himself up, more thoroughly than other men will do, to those fantastic impulses which are common to all mankind, and which saner men subjugate, but cannot exterminate. In so yielding himself, the Artist, not less than the man, was a loser, though it unquestionably gave him a certain power, as all unscrupulous passion must, of wildness and fierce vagary. This power is possessed, in different degrees, by every human being, if he will but give loose and free vent to the hell that is in him; and hence the madness, even of the meanest, is terrific. But no madness can long be considered either really Poetic or Artistical. Of the worst aspect of Blake's genius it is painful to speak. In his 'Prophecies of America,' his 'Visions of the Daughters of Albion,' and a host of unpublished drawings [the "Prophetic Books" have words as well as designs], earth-born might has banished the heavenlier elements of Art, and exists combined with all that is monstrous and diabolical. In the domain of Terror he here entered, the characteristic of his genius is fearful Reality. He embodies no Byronisms—none of the sentimentalities of civilised vice—but delights to draw evil things and evil beings in their naked and final state. The effect of these delineations is greatly heightened by the antiquity which is engraven on the faces of those who do and suffer in them. We have the impression that we are looking down into the hells of the ancient people, the Anakim, the Nephilim, and the Rephaim. Their human forms are gigantic petrifactions, from which the fires of