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 Rh turned out to be a snail tapping on the broken glass of the window.

From the end of 1825 Blake's health began to fail, and most of his letters to Linnell contain apologies for not coming to Hampstead, as he is in bed, or is suffering from a cold in the stomach. It was the beginning of that sickness which killed him, described as the mixing of the gall with the blood. He worked persistently, whether he was well or ill, at the Dante drawings, which he made in a folio book given him by Linnell. There were a hundred pages in the book, and he did a drawing on every page, some completely finished, some a mere outline; of these he had only engraved seven at the time of his death. He sat propped up in bed, at work on his drawings, saying, 'Dante goes on the better, which is all I care about.' In a letter to George Cumberland, on April 12, 1827, he writes: 'I have been very near the gates of death, and have returned very weak and an old man, feeble and tottering, but not in the spirit and life, not in the real man, the imagination, which liveth for ever.' And indeed there is no sign of age or weakness in these last great inventions of a dying