Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/69

 and wayward course. Uncomplainingly and helpfully, she shared the low and rugged fortunes which over-originality insured as his unvarying lot in life. She had mind and the ambition which follows. Not only did she prove a good housewife on straitened means, but in after-years, under his tuition and hourly companionship, she acquired, besides the useful arts of reading and writing, that which very few uneducated women with the honestest effort ever succeed in attaining—some footing of equality with her husband, She, in time, came to work off his engravings as though she had been bred to the trade; nay, imbibed enough of his very spirit to reflect it in Design which might almost have been his own.

Allan Cunningham says she was a neighbour. But the marriage took. place at Battersea, where I trace relatives of Blake's father to have been then living. During the course of the courtship, many a happy Surrey ramble must have been taken towards and around the pleasant village of the St. Johns. The old family-seat, spacious and venerable, still stood, in which Lord Bolingbroke had been born and died, which Pope had often visited. The village was 'four miles from London' then, and had just begun to shake hands with Chelsea by a timber bridge over the Thames; the river bright and clear there at low tide as at Richmond now, with many a placid angler dotting its new bridge. Green meadow and bright cornfield lay between the old-fashioned winding High Street and the purple heights of Wimbledon and Richmond. In the volume of 1783, among the poems which have least freshness of feeling, being a little alloyed by false notes as of the poetic Mocking Bird, are one or two love-poems anticipating emotions as yet unfelt. And Love, it is said, must be felt ere it can be persuasively sung. One or two stanzas, if we did not know they had been written long before, might well have been allusive to the 'black-eyed maid' of present choice and the 'sweet village' where he wooed her.