Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/83

Rh deep air. The fire in her crescent burns high across the drift of wind. Blake's touch in this appears to me curiously just and perfect; the moon does not seem to quail or flicker as a star would; but one may feel and see, as it were, the wind passing beneath her; amid the fierce fluctuation of heaven in the full breath of tempest, blown upon with all the strength of the night, she stands firm in the race of winds, where no lesser star can stand; she hangs high in clear space, pure of cloud; but no likeness of the low-hung labouring moon, no blurred and blinking planet with edges blotted and soiled in fitful vapour, would have given so splendid a sense of storm as this white triumphal light seen above the wind. Small and rough as these half-engraved designs may be, it is difficult to express in words all that is latent, even all that is evident, in the best of them. Poets and painters of Blake's kind can put enough into the slightest and swiftest work they do to baffle critics and irritate pretenders.

Friends, as we have said, were not wanting to Blake in his old age; to one of them we owe, among other more direct obligations, an inestimable debt for the "Illustrations to Job," executed on his commission. Another worthy of notice here was, until our own day called forth a better, the best English critic on art; himself, as far as we know, admirable alike as a painter, a writer, and a murderer. In each pursuit, perhaps, there was a certain want of solid worth and fervour, which at times impeded or impaired the working of an excellent faculty; but in each it is evident there was a noble sense of things fair and fit; a seemliness and shapeliness of execution,