Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/442

 338 It is in this, as in ten thousand other ways, that the pencil becomes the gorgeous sister and handmaiden of the poet's pen, kindling into inciting suggestion his flying images, and doubling the value of his priceless words. The eye is irresistibly drawn below to the bottom of the page; and what a rich and rare sense of visual joy comes as we see that serpent 'dragon of the prime,' coming carelessly from nowhere, and going, by shining cloud and crescent and sparkling star, into the emptiness of night, his tail curled, against all nature, into a writing-master's flourish, his sole apparent object being to oblige three merry fairies with a morning ride! We pray you look at his eye and mouth! How he enjoys the fun, and what a large reserve of cunning meaning there is all over his corrugated face as he puts out his forked tongue, most probably at the metaphysicians, or, however ungratefully, at Blake's manuscript itself. Turn to the other page from America. Its relations to the great Republic seem remote to the sense. Yet in the 'tall talk' in the centre of the design—the strong and terribly bloodshot tone of which is greatly subdued by the pretty little twirls and twiddles into which its letters run—we see a foreshadowing of at least an accusation against America; and in the capacity of the genii, who weigh all creation in their own scales, and fly away with the sword of the earth, and fling world-powers into the void as easily as Athamas dashed Learchus in pieces, and who perform Blondin feats on 'Serpents of Eternity,' instead of tight-ropes, between spires of rushing flame, ascending out of the abyss, we see allusions closer than we might at first suppose to the 'greatest people on the face of the earth.' Yet their chief value does not lie in this. It is the mysterious fascination of 'line'—the mingling of creative might and child-like play—the astonishing power which dark and strongly imprinted curves can give—lucus a non lucendo—the sense of flashing flame—the power to 'make black seem white,'—which so enchains and half stupefies the fancy. As a specific example of this, look at what we may