obstinately refuses to
let his mind be regulated, but bawls out his mad visions the louder, the
more they are combated, there is nothing for it but to go back to his
Kitty, and the little tenement in Green Street.

But real friends Blake found, who, if they could not quite understand
him, could love and honor and assist. Flaxman, the "Sculptor for
Eternity," and Fuseli, the fiery-hearted Swiss painter, stood up for him
manfully. His own younger brother, Robert, shared his talents, and
became for a time a loved and honored member of his family,--too much
honored, if we may credit an anecdote in which the brother appears to
much better advantage than the husband. A dispute having one day arisen
between Robert and Mrs. Blake, Mr. Blake, after a while, deemed her to
have gone too far, and bade her kneel down and beg Robert's pardon, or
never see her husband's face again. Nowise convinced, she nevertheless
obeyed the stern command, and acknowledged herself in the wrong. "Young
woman, you lie!" retorted Robert "_I_ am in the wrong!" This beloved
brother died at the age of twenty-five. During his last illness, Blake
attended him with the most affectionate devotion, nor ever left the
bedside till he beheld the disembodied spirit leave the frail clay and
soar heavenward, clapping its hands for joy!

His brother gone, though not so far away that he did not often revisit
the old home,--friendly Flaxman in Italy, but more inaccessible there
than Robert in the heaven which lay above this man in his perpetual
infancy,--the _bas-bleus_ reinclosed in the charmed circle in which
Blake had so riotously disported himself, a small attempt at
partnership, shop-keeping, and money-making, wellnigh "dead before it
was born,"--the poet began to think of publishing. The verses of which
we have spoken had been seen but by few people, and the store was
constantly increasing. Influence with the publishers, and money to
defray expenses, were alike wanting. A copy of Lavater's "Aphorisms,"
translated by his fellow-countryman, Fuseli, had received upon its
margins various annotations which reveal the man in his moods. "The
great art to love your enemy consists in never losing sight of _man_ in
him," says Lavater. "None _can_ see the man in the enemy," pencils
Blake. "If he is ignorantly so, he is not truly an enemy; if maliciously
so, not a man. I cannot love my enemy; for my enemy is not a man, but a
beast. And if I have any, I can love him as a be