Page:Facsimile of the original outlines before colouring of The songs of innocence and of experience executed by William Blake.djvu/26

 and the Pebble," the symbolic sheep and cattle that tread the clod are easy to understand. The frogs, worm, and duck drawn below, are elementary inhabitants of the watery world.

The "Infant Joys" who suffer in the pictures to the second Holy Thursday are shown as sad, but not attenuated children. They are not skeletons. They bear no visible imprint of hunger. Their cravings are emotional and spiritual.

The little girl lost is herself a desire in the bosom of a grown up maiden, who, in the picture, stands in a robe of "crimson joy," embracing her lover in sad slate colour, the two surrounded by a purple cloud, a portion of midnight, through which she points to the light. In the second picture she is alone, lying in despair under the trees, dressed in grey. Not a trace of direct connection with the story can be found, the object of the pictures being to explain the vision of the poem rather than to embody the description in the verse. This is done in the last design to "A Little Girl Found," where innocence and passion are seen in happy companionship, evidently in the "new worlds" of the Song called "Night." The rough sketch, apparently from life, of the Chimney Sweep in a snow-storm, is valuable as showing how free Blake felt in putting down whatever made an impression on him, without asking himself for one moment whether the result would look decorative or poetic. The illustration to the second Nurse's Song shows a pretty girl in red—evidently the Nurse herself, in the lost "days of her youth" stopping to admire the head of a romantic boy in green, who strikes an attitude and waits for her to go on combing his hair.

In great contrast, the next picture, showing the soul of the sick rose taking flight as the worm crawls in, is so simple a symbol that explanation is silent before it, because it is so easy to explain. But the picture to the Fly renews interpretative difficulty. What have the nurse, the little boy, and the girl with the battledore and shuttlecock to do with the poem? These children are "happy flies." The Angel and the Maiden Queen bring us back to the region of the obvious again, as does the absurd tiger who spoils the page of a fine poem. The Pretty Rose Tree shows the red girl and the slate-coloured lover of a former picture, and suggests their meaning.

In the next, the monk and two children by an open grave are an addition to the poem, not only an illustration. They show the "happy flies" unnecessarily saddened when caught in the "net of religion."

The "Little Vagabond" with its audaciously prosaic and bewilderingly blunt language, is cruelly placed below the finest of all the designs, representing the great reconciliation, that of God and Adam, in whose bosom is the "Devil" to whom the poem wishes "drink and apparel." They kneel to each other, one in contrition, the Other in pity.

"London" shows London personated as an old man "blind and age-bent,