Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/118



But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.

The power of these wild utterances is enhanced to the utmost by the rich adornments of design and colour in which they are set—design as imaginative as the text, colour which has the lustre of jewels.

A strip of azure sky surmounts, and of land divides, the words of the title-page, leaving on each side scant and baleful trees, little else than stem and spray. Drawn on a tiny scale, lies a corpse, and one bends over it. Flames burst forth below and slant upward across the page, gorgeous with every hue. In their very core two spirits rush together and embrace. These beautiful figures appear to have suggested to Flaxman the delicately executed bas-relief on Collins's monument.

In the second design, to the right of the page, there runs up an almost lifeless tree. A man clinging to the thin stem, and holding by a branch, reaches its only cluster to a woman standing below. Distant are three figures reposing on the ground. At the top of the third, a woman with outspread arms is borne away on flames—

beneath, two figures are rushing away from a female lying on the earth.

In the next, the sun sets over the sea in blood. A spirit, grasping a child, walks on the waves. Another, in the midst of fire, would fain rush to her, but an iron link clinches his ankle to the rock.

The fifth resembles the catastrophe of Phaëton, save that there is but one horse. Spires of flame are already kindling below.

Under the text of the sixth, an accusing demon, with batlike wings, points fiercely to a scroll—a great parchment scroll across his knees. A figure sits on each side recording.