Urizen heard their cry:—
And stretched his clouds over Jerusalem:
For Adam, a mouldering skeleton,
Lay bleached on the garden of Eden;
And Noah, as white as snow,
On the mountains of Ararat.
He thunders desolately from the heavens; Orc rises 'like a pillar of fire above the Alps,' the earth shrinks, the resurrection of the dry bones is described, and the poem concludes.
Of the illustrations, two are separate pictures occupying the full page; the rest surround and blend with the text in the usual manner; and if they have not all the beauty, they share a full measure of the spirit and force of Blake. The colour is laid on with an impasto which, gives an opaque and heavy look to some of them, and the medium being oil, the surface and tints have suffered. Here, as elsewhere, the designs seldom directly embody the subjects of the poem, but are independent though kindred conceptions—the right method perhaps.
As if the artist himself were at length beginning to grow weary. The Book of Ahania (1795), last of this series, is quite unadorned, except by two vignettes, one on the title, the other on the concluding page. The text is neatly engraved in plain black and white, without border or decoration of any kind. There are lines and passages of much force and beauty, but they emerge from surrounding obscurity like lightning out of a cloud:—
'And ere a man hath power to say—Behold!
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.'
The first half of the poem is occupied with the dire warfare between Urizen and his rebellious son, Fuzon. Their weapons are thus describled:—
The broad disk of Urizen upheaved,
Across the void many a mile.
It was forged in mills where the winter
Beats incessant: ten winters the disk
Unremitting endured the cold hammer.
