Page:William Blake, his life, character and genius.djvu/127

 V.

has already been made to the remarkable figure, "The Ancient of Days," forming the frontispiece to the next prophecy, Europe. It was a favourite composition with Blake; and, according to Smith, when colouring it by hand, he "always bestowed more time and enjoyed greater pleasure in the task than from anything else he produced." All the designs to this work are on the same scale of grandeur as the first. Most of them cover either the whole or the greater portion of the page. There is no dallying with delight or straying by peaceful ways as in the America. On the only two pages whereon an attempt is made at decoration pure and simple, the designs are of spiders with their webs and victims, or mingled serpents and caterpillars. There is a jostling throughout of the grotesque and the horrible, the wild and portentous. Below and between the lines of the title we have the coils of a huge serpent; dividing the pages with the prelude are two illustrations, one representing a naked man at the mouth of a cavern lying in wait to murder a traveller, the other showing three strangely contorted figures descending into the abyss, while a fourth springs upwards on to a cloud. On another page there is a horrent figure of War, crowned and in mail, turning away from winged angels pleading for peace; 113