Page:William Blake (IA williamblake00ches).pdf/78

 a system of illustrations to Dante; but I think that no one expected him to live to finish it.

His last sickness fell upon him very slowly, and he does not seem to have taken much notice of it. He continued perpetually his pictorial designs; and as long as they were growing stronger he seems to have cared very little for the fact that he was growing weaker himself. One of the last designs he made was one of the strongest he ever made—the tremendous image of the Almighty bending forward, foreshortened in a colossal perspective, to trace out the heavens with a compass. Nowhere else has he so well expressed his primary theistic ideas—that God, though infinitely gigantic, should be as solid as a giant. He had often drawn men from the life; not unfrequently he had drawn his dead men from the life. Here, according to his own conceptions, he may be said to have drawn God from the life. When he had finished the portrait (which he made sitting up in his sick-bed) he called out cheerfully, "What shall I draw after that?" Doubtless