Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/432

328 more sketchy examples of landscape art, the most bewitching impressions from this sophistical play of the elements into each other. Translate some of the sketches labelled 'Evening' or 'Solitude,' into black and white, and their glory would sink into a compost of rude forms, gloomy and incorrect, quite incapable of existing alone. Add the daring tints—the sombre greens, the purples, clouded with fluent ultramarine, the red bands of fire seen between dark tree stems, the amber seas of air, or 'that green light which lingers in the West'—and you are so far imposed upon that you do not dream of questioning the legality of the magic which, by its very intensification of mutual and interchangeable errors, produces on the mind the same sensation wrought on it when beholding the splendid shows of the landscape itself. We are far from believing that the rule and square of mere literal truth can be rigidly applied to human reproductions of nature. The difficulty of analysing the great equations and compensatory powers of art will ever make it an interesting subject of pursuit to the human race. It is a sea whose horizon fades—

Even when colour is used in the engraver's sense of black and white alone, these comminglings, as mystic as twilight, retain their power over the eye and fancy. Opposite to page 320, vol. i. of Blake's Life, there are three woodcuts which fully illustrate our meaning. They were done to ornament the Pastorals of Virgil, edited by Dr. Thornton, and are of a degree of rudeness apparently verging on incapacity. Yet we would venture to ask any competent judge whether an effect in a high degree poetic is not produced by the total sentiment of the design. To our eye they seem to contain a germ of that grandeur and sense of awe and power of landscape which, in some of his works, John Linnell has carried out so finely, where dawn-lights dream over tranquil folds, or evening slowly leaves the valley flock to the peace of night.