Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/337

 and departing from material forms, angels hovering near poor human creatures, and the like emblems,—be adequate or not. In such intensity as Blake's, it was truly a blissful possession; it proved enchanted armour against the world, the flesh, and the devil, and all their sordid influences.

I have still a word to say àpropos of one of these twelve designs, and a water-colour drawing formerly in Mr. Butts' collection, illustrative of the verse —

It is a duplicate, probably, of one of the unengraved designs from Young. The main feature, a descending precipice broken into dark recesses, is the same as in that grand and eloquent tableau in the Blair, of the Descent of Man into the Vale of Death. The figures are different, but the same motive pervades both designs.

Of the composition in the Blair, an intelligible summary occurs in Cromek's Descriptive List at the end of the volume. The pious daughter, weeping and conducting her sire onward; age, creeping carefully on hands and knees; an elder, without friend or kindred; a raiser; a bachelor, blindly proceeding, no one knows whither, ready to drop into the dark abyss; frantic youth, rashly devoted to vice and passion, rushing past the diseased and old who totter on crutches; the wan, declining virgin; the miserable and distracted widow; the hale country youth; and the mother and her numerous progeny, already arrived in this valley, are among the groups which, &c.—are, in fact, all the groups.'

The fate of the original copper-plates has been somewhat singular. After being used by Ackermann to illustrate a Spanish Poem, ''Meditaciones Poeticas por Jose Janquin de Mora: Londres: asimismo en Colombia, Buenos Ayres. Chili, Pero y Guatemala, 1826, they, at a more recent period, I have been told, found their way across the Alantic, serving for an American edition—not of Blair's poem, but of Martin Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy''.