Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/420

316 It is as various, as incessant, as full of rainbow colour and mingled sound. One of our most unquestionable men of genius tells us how, as a child, landscape nature was effectually haunted to him. The cataract chimed in his ears and sang mysterious songs; the 'White Lady of Avenel' fluttered about his path, or sank in the black swirl and foam of the whirlpool. A child-painter will find it a bliss to notice that the distant hills are of a fine Titianesque blue, long before he knows who Titian was, or has seen a picture. It will give him ineffable joy to see how the valley lifts itself towards the mountains, and how the streams meander from their recesses. He is not taught this; it comes to him as blossoms come to the spring, and is the first mark of his vocation. It was this inward thirst and longing that sent out the boy Blake into the fields and lanes, and among the surburban hills. The force of boyish imagination must have been stronger in him than in most, even of the children of genius, for, as early as the age of thirteen or fourteen, the conceptions of his mind began to assume an external form. He saw a tree sparkling in the sun, and discovered that it was filled with angels. When he narrated this event at home, his father was disposed to beat him for telling a lie, and would have done so but for the interposition of his mother. Yet he continued to maintain the substantial truth of his story. In later life he perplexed friends and strangers by his mingling of the inward and outward. He was, on one occasion, "talking to a little group gathered round him, within hearing of a lady whose children had just come home from boarding-school for the holidays. 'The other evening,' said Blake, in his usual quiet way, 'taking a walk, I came to a meadow, and at the further corner of it I saw a fold of lambs. Coming nearer, the ground blushed with flowers, and the wattled cote and its woolly tenants were of an exquisite pastoral beauty. But I looked again, and it proved to be no living flock, but beautiful sculpture.' The lady, thinking that this was a capital holiday-show for her