Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/362

 his copper-plate press Books of 'Prophetic' poetry and design, such as we saw him busied with, year by year, in Hercules Buildings. The Milton and the Jerusalem were the only ones thus issued from South Molton Street, and his last in that class. Sibylline leaves of engraved writing were, however, now and then put forth; such as that On Homer's Poetry, the Laocoon, the Ghost of Abel. As I have hinted, funds failed for the mere copper requisite to engrave lengthy productions like the Jerusalem; perhaps also, amid entire discouragement, the spirit for such weighty, bootless toil. He continued writing in the old strain till the end of his life,—wrote more, he declared himself, than Shakespeare and Milton put together. Scores of MSS. were produced, which never got beyond MS., and have since been scattered, most of them destroyed or lost. He could find no publisher here for writing or design. Many an unsuccessful application to the trade, as to undertaking some book of his, he, in his time, had to make. 'Well, it is published elsewhere,' he, after such an one, would quietly say, 'and beautifully bound.' Let the reader construe such words with candour. Blake, by the way, talked little about 'posterity,' an emptier vision far than those on which his abstracted gaze was oft-times fixed. The invisible world, present to him even here, it was that to which his soul turned; in it found refuge amid the slights of the outward, vulgar throng.

Many of the almost numberless host of Blake's watercolour drawings, on high scriptural and poetic themes, or frescos, as he called those (even on paper) more richly coloured, and with more impasto than the rest, continued to be produced; some for Mr. Butts, some to lie on hand; all now widely dispersed, many undated, unhappily, though mostly signed. If men would but realise the possible value of a date! Still more numerous rough sketches were thrown off; for Blake's hand was ceaselessly at work. His was indefatigable industry. He thought nothing of entering on such a task as writing out; with ornamental letters, a MS. Bible