Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/182

 CHAPTER XV.

1795-6, Miller, the publisher, of Old Bond Street, employed Blake to illustrate a new edition in quarto, of a translation of Bürger's Lenore, by one Mr. J. T. Stanley, F.R.S. The first edition (1786), had preceded by ten years Sir Walter Scott's translation, which came out at the same time as Stanley's new edition. The amateur version amounts to a paraphrase, not to say a new poem; the original being 'altered and added to,' to square it with 'the cause of religion and morality.' Blake's illustrations are engraved by a man named Perry, and are three in number. One is a frontispiece,—Lenore clasping her ghostly bridegroom on their earth-scorning charger; groups of imps and spectres from hell hovering above and dancing below; a composition full of grace in the principal figures, wild horror and diablerie in the accessories. Another—a vignette—is an idealised procession of Prussian soldiers, escorted by their friends; Lenore and her mother vainly gazing into the crowd in quest of their missing William. It is a charmingly composed group characterised by more than Stothard's grace and statuesque beauty. The third illustration, also a vignette, is the awakening of Lenore from her terrible dream, William rushing into her arms in the presence of the old St. Anna-like mother,—for such is the turn the catastrophe takes under Mr. Stanley's