the young student had reached the vestibule of the temple; but

"Every door was barred with gold, and opened but to golden keys,"

which, alas! to him were wanting. Nothing daunted, his sincere soul
preferred to be a doorkeeper in the house of his worship rather than a
dweller in the tents of Mammon. Unable to be an artist, he was content
for the time to become an artisan, and chose to learn engraving,--a
craft which would keep him within sight and sound of the heaven from
which he was shut out. Application was first made to Ryland, then in the
zenith of his fame, engraver to the King, friend of authors and artists,
himself a graceful, accomplished, and agreeable gentleman. But the
marvellous eyes that pierced through mortal gloom to immortal glory saw
also the darkness that brooded behind uncanny light. "I do not like the
man's face," said young Blake, as he was leaving the shop with his
father; "it looks as if he will live to be hanged." The negotiation
failed; Blake was apprenticed to Basire; and twelve years after, the
darkness that had lain so long in ambush came out and hid the day:
Ryland was hanged.

His new master, Basire, was one of those workmen who magnify their
office and make it honorable. The most distinguished of four generations
of Basires, engravers, he is represented as a superior, liberal-minded,
upright man, and a kind master. With him Blake served out his seven
years of apprenticeship, as faithful, painstaking, and industrious as
any blockhead. So great was the confidence which he secured, that, month
after month, and year after year, he was sent out alone to Westminster
Abbey and the various old churches in the neighborhood, to make drawings
from the monuments, with no oversight but that of his own taste and his
own conscience. And a rich reward we may well suppose his integrity
brought him, in the charming solitudes of those old-time sanctuaries.
Wandering up and down the consecrated aisles,--eagerly peering through
the dim, religious light for the beautiful forms that had leaped from
many a teeming brain now turned to dust,--reproducing, with patient
hand, graceful outline and deepening shadow,--his daring, yet reverent
heart held high communion with the ages that were gone. The Spirit of
the Past overshadowed him. The grandeur of Gothic symbolism rose before
him. Voices of dead centuries murmured low music down the fretted vault.
Fair ladies and brave gentlemen came up from the solemn cham