Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/443

 Rh call 'the prophecy of Blondin,' the Herculean tumbler on the Serpent of Eternity. How amazingly grand the lines! Carve it in onyx, and have we not an antique gem of the first water,—Phidias and Michael Angelo in little? Yet pass below the giant acrobat's elbow, and Michael Angelo subsides into a schoolboy finishing his little theme with an innocent flourish. This is Blake all over. Now he is a Titan hurling rocks at the gods—now a chubby boy toddling to the infant-school and singing his pretty, echoing song.

Besides these books and 'prophecies,' Blake made many designs of a separate or serial kind, and found in Mr. Butts a kind, steadfast, and appreciative patron. For nearly thirty years the modest, simple-living Blake found a constant resource in this worthy friend's patronage. It is a beautiful picture of his typical life of Arcadian simplicity and sufficiency to see this plain liver and high thinker taking his weekly design to sell for a very moderate price, and returning to dream, and draw, and engrave in his own humble home. Out of this simple life issued, in 1794, the Songs of Experience. Flaxman used to exclaim, 'Sir, his poems are as grand as his pictures;' and Wordsworth 'read them with delight.' Yet words do not tell the half of Blake's poems—do not reveal half the man. Some pieces will bear separation from the rainbow pages on which they originally appeared; others, and most of them, lose half their thrill and motion when enchained in the printer's 'forme.' -'When the brown poem and rough ground-lines of the design were stamped on the rough paper by the rude press, then his lyrical fingers, playing with the prisms of water-colour, washed and touched all over them in a way not to be described—poem and picture twined fondly round each other, in a bath of colour and light, refusing to be separated. So that he who is to understand Blake must be admitted to the penetralia where such sights are to be seen. Not that he had any special aim at exceptional seclusion. 'Come in' he would say, 'it is only Adam and Eve,' as in an anecdote narrated at length by Mr.