hair, not unworthy the typical man and woman. Another design which deserves remark is a fine sketch after the manner of the illustrations to Blake's prophecies, in which a figure caught in the fierce slanting current of a whirlwind is drifted sideways like a drowning swimmer under sea, below the orbit of three mingling suns or planets seen above thick drifts of tempestuous air. Other and better notices than ours, of various studies hidden away in the chaos of this MS., the reader will find on reference to that admirable Catalogue which will remain always the great witness for Blake's genius before the eyes of all who read his life.
We have done now with the lyrical side of this poet's work,[1] and pass on to things of less direct attraction. Those who have found any in the record of his life and character, the study of his qualities and abilities, may safely follow him further. The perfect sweetness and sufficiency of his best lyrics and his best designs, we
- ↑ Of Blake's prose other samples are extant besides the notes on art published in the second volume of the Life and Selections. These strays are for the most part, as far as I have seen, mere waifs of weed and barren drift. One fragment, not without some grace and thoughtfulness curiously used up and thrown away, is an allegory of "the Gods which came from Fear," of Shame born of the "poisonous seed" of pride, and such things; written much in the manner of those early Ossianic studies which dilate and deform the volume of Poetical Sketches: perhaps composed (though properly never composed at all) about the same time. Another, a sort of satire on critics and "philosophers," seems to emulate the style of Sterne in his intervals of lax and dull writing; in execution it is some depths below the baby stories of little Malkin, whose ghost might well have blushed rejection of the authorship. The fragment on Laocoon is a mere cento of stray notes on art which reaffirm in a chaotic and spluttering manner Blake's theories that the only real prayer is study of art, the only real praise, its practice; that excellence of art, not moral virtue, is the aim and the essence of Christianity; and much more of the same sort. These notes, crammed into every blank space and corner of the engraved page, burst out as it were and boil over, disconnected but irrepressible, in a feverish watery style. All really good or even passable prose of Blake's seems to be given in the volume of Selections.
