Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/435

Rh on the walls, was obliged to listen to the appeal of the cannibal mother, hangs over it; a sense of tragic culmination, the stroke of doom irreversible, comes through the windows of the eyes, as they take in the straight black lines of the pall and bier, the mother falling from her husband's embrace with her dying child; one fair corpse scarcely earthed over in the foreground, and the black funereal reek of a distant fire, which consumes we know not what difficult horror. It is enough to fire the imagination of the greatest historical painter. And yet the manner is so dry, so common, even so uninteresting, and so unlikely to find its way to 'every drawing room-table,' that a man of accomplishments and appreciative powers, but without the 'vision and the faculty divine,' would be sorely tempted to 'convey' the thinking to his own canvas, and array it in forms more attractive to the taste, without being haunted by the fear of his theft being speedily recognised.

When he was a little over thirty years of age Blake collected and published one of his sweetest and most original works, The Songs of Innocence, engraving the poem in a singular way with delightful designs on copper. These plates, a remnant of which we have had the good fortune to see, are somewhat like rude, deep-cut casts in copper, from engraved wood blocks. They were drawn on the copper with some thick liquid, impervious to acid; the plate was then immersed in aquafortis, and 'bitten' away, so that the design remained in relief. These he printed with his own hand, in various tones of brown, blue, and grey, tinting them afterwards by hand into a sort of rainbow-coloured, innocent page, in which the thrilling music of the verse, and the gentle bedazzlement of the lines and colours so intermingle, that the mind hangs in a pleasant uncertainty as to whether it is a picture that is singing, or a song which has newly budded and blossomed into colour and form. All is what the title imports; and though they have been, of late years, frequently quoted, and