Page:The letters of William Blake (1906).djvu/49

 Rh works; for towards the end of his life he departed in some measure from the very austere method of colouring which he originally employed, and permitted himself a more liberal use of the subtleties and varieties of tint of which his medium was capable.

The last great labour of his life, and one of the most remarkable evidences of his extraordinary genius for the invention of design, is the series of ninety-eight illustrations which he made for the Divine Comedy, an undertaking which occupied him until the very end, even upon his deathbed, for the prodigious intellectual energy which characterised his whole life, remained to the last creative; and in a letter to Linnell, shortly before death, he wrote: "I am too much attached to Dante to think much of anything else." Though he did not live long enough to bring more than a few of the whole number to completion, yet in every instance, even where the merest pencil outline is all that exists, he never failed to convey all the essentials of his idea, with a vigour and comprehension that showed no signs of decay. Seven of the set only were engraved by him, including the "Paolo and Francesca, with the Whirlwind of Lovers," which is here reproduced, and which is the most beautiful of them. Of the remainder, which he did not live to engrave, the most striking designs among those which approach a finished state are "Dante