Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/235



I also enclose you some ballads by Mr. Hayley, with prints to them by your humble servant. I should have sent them before now, but could not get anything done for you to please myself; for I do assure you that I have truly studied the two little pictures I now send, and do not repent of the time I have spent upon them.

God bless you!

Next year, in an extract from Hayley's Diary, we again get sight of Blake for a moment:—26th and 29th of March, 1803—'Read the death of Klopstock in the newspaper of the day, and looked into his Messiah, both the original and the translation. Read Klopstock into English to Blake, and translated the opening of his third canto, where he speaks of his own death.' Hayley was at this time trying to learn German, 'finding that it contained a poem on the Four Ages of Woman,' of which he, 'for some time, made it a rule to