and of
land divides, the words of the title-page, leaving on each side scant
and baleful trees, little else than stem and spray. Drawn on a tiny
scale lies a corpse, and one bends over it. Flames burst forth below and
slant upward across the page, gorgeous with every hue. In their very
core, two spirits rush together and embrace." In the seventh design is
"a little island of the sea, where an infant springs to its mother's
bosom. From the birth-cleft ground a spirit has half emerged. Below,
with outstretched arms and hoary beard, an awful, ancient man rushes at
you, as it were, out of the page." The eleventh is "a surging of mingled
fire, water, and blood, wherein roll the volumes of a huge,
double-fanged serpent, his crest erect, his jaws wide open." "The
ever-fluctuating color, the spectral pigmies rolling, flying, leaping
among the letters, the ripe bloom of quiet corners, the living light and
bursts of flame, the spires and tongues of fire vibrating with the full
prism, make the page seem to move and quiver within its boundaries, and
you lay the book down tenderly, as if you had been handling something
sentient."

We have not space to give a description, scarcely even a catalogue, of
Blake's numerous works. Wild, fragmentary, gorgeous dreams they are,
tangled in with strange allegoric words and designs, that throb with
their prisoned vitality. The energy, the might, the intensity of his
lines and figures it is impossible for words to convey. It is power in
the fiercest, most eager action,--fire and passion, the madness and the
stupor of despair, the frenzy of desire, the lurid depths of woe, that
thrill and rivet you even in the comparatively lifeless rendering of
this book. The mere titles of the poems give but a slight clue to their
character. Ideas are upheaved in a tossing surge of words. It is a
mystic, but lovely Utopia, into which "The Gates of Paradise" open. The
practical name of "America" very faintly foreshadows the Ossianic Titans
that glide across its pages, or the tricksy phantoms, the headlong
spectres, the tongues of flame, the folds and fangs of symbolic
serpents, that writhe and leap and dart and riot there. With a poem
named "Europe," we should scarcely expect for a frontispiece the Ancient
of Days, in unapproached grandeur, setting his "compass upon the face of
the Earth,"--a vision revealed to the designer at the top of his own
staircase.

Small favor and small notice these works secured from