One more extract shall suffice:—
The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up.
The bones of death, the covering clay, the sinews shrunk and dried.
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring,—like redeemed captives when their bonds and bars are burst.
Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field;
Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air.
Let the enchained soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,
Rise, and look out!—his chains are loose! his dungeon doors are open!
The poem has no distinctly seizable pretensions to a prophetic character, being, like the rest of Blake's 'Books of Prophecy,' rather a retrospect, in its mystic way, of events already transpired. The American War of Independence is the theme; a portion of history here conducted mainly by vast mythic beings, 'Orc,' the 'Angels of Albion,' the 'Angels of the thirteen states,' &c.; whose movements are throughout accompanied by tremendous elemental commotion—'red clouds and raging fire;' 'black smoke, thunder,' and
Plagues creeping on the burning winds driven by flames of Orc,
through which chaos the merely human agents show small and remote, perplexed and busied in an ant-like way. Strange to conceive a somewhile associate of Paine producing these 'Prophetic ' volumes!
The America now and then occurs coloured, more often plain black, or occasionally blue and white. The designs blend with and surround the verse; the mere grouping of the text, filled in here and there with ornament, often forming, in itself, a picturesque piece of decorative composition. Of the beauty of most of these designs, in their finished state, it would be quite impossible to obtain any notion, without
