Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/495

 of Blake's own colouring differ extremely in finish and richness, as has been already noted here. The Museum copy of the Songs of Innocence and Experience is rather a poor one, though it will serve to judge of the book; and some others of his works are there represented by copies which, I feel convinced, are not coloured by Blake's hand at all, but got up more or less in his manner, and brought into the market after his death. But two volumes here—the Song of Los, and especially the smaller of the two collections of odd plates from his different works, which is labelled Designs by W. Blake, and numbered, inside the fly-leaf, 5240—afford specimens of his colouring, perhaps equal to any that could be seen.

The tinting in the Song of Los is not, throughout, of one order of value; but no finer example of Blake's power in rendering poetic effects of landscape could be found, than that almost miraculous expression of the glow and freedom of air in closing sunset, in a plate where a youth and maiden, lightly embraced, are racing along a saddened low-lit hill, against an open sky of blazing and changing wonder. But in the volume of collected designs I have specified, almost every plate (or more properly water-colour drawing, as the printed groundwork in such specimens is completely overlaid) shows Blake's colour to advantage, and some in its very fullest force. See, for instance, in plate 8, the deep, unfathomable, green sea churning a broken foam as white as milk against that sky which is all blue and gold and blood-veined heart of fire; while from sea to sky one locked and motionless face gazes, as it might seem, for ever. Or, in plate 9, the fair tongues and threads of liquid flame deepening to the redness of blood, lapping round the flesh-tints of a human figure which bathes and swims in the furnace. Or plate 12 which, like the other two, really embodies some of the wild ideas in Urizen, but might seem to be Aurora guiding the new-born day, as a child, through a soft-complexioned sky of fleeting rose and tingling grey, such as only dawn and