Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/144

 The poem concludes thus: —

The designs to the Visions of the Daughters of Albion are magnificent in energy and portentousness. They are coloured with flat, even tints, not worked up highly. A frontispiece represents Bromion and Oothoon, chained in a cave that opens on the sea; Theotormon sitting near. The title-page is of great beauty; the words are written over rainbow and cloud, from the centre of which emerges an old man in fire, other figures floating round. We give two specimens. One (page 103) illustrates the Argument we have quoted; the other (page 97), an incident in the poem (also quoted), where the eagles of Theotormon rend the flesh of Oothoon.

The other volume of this year's production at Lambeth, entitled America, a Prophecy, is a folio of twenty pages, of still more dithyrambic verse. It is verse hard to fathom; with far too little Nature behind it, or back-bone; a redundance of mere invention,—the fault of all this class of Blake's writings; too much wild tossing about of ideas and words. The very names—Urthona, Enitharmon, Orc, &c. are but Ossian-like shadows, and contrast oddly with those of historic or matter-of-fact personages occasionally mentioned in the poem; whom, notwithstanding the subject in hand, we no longer expect to meet with, after reading the Preludium:—