Kitabı oku: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 78, April, 1864», sayfa 6
PICTOR IGNOTUS
Human nature is impatient of mysteries. The occurrence of an event out of the line of common causation, the advent of a person not plastic to the common moulds of society, causes a great commotion in this little ant-hill of ours. There is perplexity, bewilderment, a running hither and thither, until the foreign substance is assigned a place in the ranks; and if there be no rank to which it can be ascertained to belong, a new rank shall be created to receive it, rather than that it shall be left to roam up and down, baffling, defiant, and alone. Indeed, so great is our abhorrence of outlying, unclassified facts, that we are often ready to accept classification for explanation; and having given our mystery a niche and a name, we cease any longer to look upon it as mysterious. The village-schoolmaster, who displayed his superior knowledge to the rustics gazing at an eclipse of the sun by assuring them that it was "only a phenomenon," was but one of a great host of wiseacres who stand ready with brush and paint-pot to label every new development, and fancy that in so doing they have abundantly answered every reasonable inquiry concerning cause, character, and consequence.
When William Blake flashed across the path of English polite society, society was confounded. It had never had to do with such an apparition before, and was at its wits' end. But some Daniel was found wise enough to come to judgment, and pronounce the poet-painter mad; whereupon society at once composed itself, and went on its way rejoicing.
There are a few persons, however, who are not disposed to let this verdict stand unchallenged. Mr. Arthur Gilchrist, late a barrister of the Middle Temple, a man, therefore, who must have been accustomed to weigh evidence, and who would not have been likely to decide upon insufficient grounds, wrote a life of Mr. Blake, in which he strenuously and ably opposed the theory of insanity. From this book, chiefly, we propose to lay before our readers a slight sketch of the life of a man who, whether sane or insane, was one of the most remarkable productions of his own or of any age.
One word, in the beginning, regarding the book before us. The death of its author, while as yet but seven chapters of his work had been printed, would preclude severe criticism, even if the spirit and purpose with which he entered upon his undertaking, and which he sustained to its close, did not dispose us to look leniently upon imperfections of detail. Possessing that first requisite of a biographer, thorough sympathy with his subject, he did not fall into the opposite error of indiscriminate panegyric. Looking at life from the standpoint of the "madman," he saw how fancies could not only appear, but be, facts; and then, crossing over, he looked at the madman from the world's standpoint, and saw how these soul-born facts could seem not merely fancies, but the wild vagaries of a crazed brain. For the warmth with which he espoused an unpopular cause, for the skill with which he set facts in their true light, for the ability which he brought to the defence of a man whom the world had agreed to condemn, for the noble persistence with which he forced attention to genius that had hitherto received little but neglect, we cannot too earnestly express our gratitude. But the greater our admiration of material excellence, the greater is our regret for superficial defects. The continued oversight of the author would doubtless have removed many infelicities of style; yet we marvel that one with so clear an insight should ever, even in the first glow of composition, have involved himself in sentences so complicated and so obscure. The worst faults of Miss Sheppard's worst style are reproduced here, joined to an unthriftiness in which she had no part nor lot. Not unfrequently a sentence Is a conglomerate in which the ideas to be conveyed are heaped together with no apparent attempt at arrangement, unity, or completeness. Surely, it need be no presumptuous, but only a tender and reverent hand that should have organized these chaotic periods, completing the work which death left unfinished, and sending it forth to the world in a garb not unworthy the labor of love so untiringly bestowed upon it by the lamented author.
To show that our strictures are not undeserved, we transcribe a few sentences, taken at random from the memoir:—
"Which decadence it was led this Pars to go into the juvenile Art-Academy line, vice Shipley retired."
"The unusual notes struck by William Blake, in any case appealing but to one class and a small one, were fated to remain unheard, even by the Student of Poetry, until the process of regeneration had run its course, and, we may say, the Poetic Revival gone to seed again: seeing that the virtues of simplicity and directness the new poets began by bringing once more into the foreground, are those least practised now."
"In after years of estrangement from Stothard, Blake used to complain of this mechanical employment as engraver to a fellow-designer, who (he asserted) first borrowed from one that, in his servile capacity, had then to copy that comrade's version of his own inventions—as to motive and composition his own, that is."
"And this imposing scroll of fervid truisms and hap-hazard generalities, as often disputable as not, if often acute and striking, always ingenuous and pleasant, was, like all his other writings, warmly welcomed in this country."
Let us now go back a hundred years, to the time when William Blake was a fair-haired, smooth-browed boy, wandering aimlessly, after the manner of boys, about the streets of London. It might seem at first a matter of regret that a soul full of all glowing and glorious fancies should have been consigned to the damp and dismal dulness of that crowded city; but, in truth, nothing could be more fit. To this affluent, creative mind dinginess and dimness were not. Through the grayest gloom golden palaces rose before him, silver pavements shone beneath his feet, jewelled gates unfolded on golden hinges turning, and he wandered forth into a fair country. What need of sunshine and bloom for one who saw in the deepest darkness a "light that never was on sea or land"? Rambling out into the pleasant woods of Dulwich, through the green meadows of Walton, by the breezy heights of Sydenham, bands of angels attended him. They walked between the toiling haymakers, they hovered above him in the apple-boughs, and their bright wings shone like stars. For him there was neither awe nor mystery, only delight. Angels were no more unnatural than apples. But the honest hosier, his father, took different views. Never in all his life had that worthy citizen beheld angels perched on tree-tops, and he was only prevented from administering to his son a sound thrashing for the absurd falsehood by the intercession of his mother. Ah, these mothers! By what fine sense is it that they detect the nascent genius for which man's coarse perception can find no better name than perverseness, and no wiser treatment than brute force?
The boy had much reason to thank his mother, for to her intervention it was doubtless largely due that he was left to follow his bent, and haunt such picture-galleries as might be found in noblemen's houses and public sale-rooms. There he feasted his bodily eyes on earthly beauty, as his mental gaze had been charmed with heavenly visions. From admiration to imitation was but a step, and the little hands soon began to shape such rude, but loving copies as Raffaelle, with tears in his eyes, must have smiled to see. His father, moved by motherly persuasions, as we can easily infer, bought him casts for models, that he might continue his drawing-lessons at home; his own small allowance of pocket-money went for prints; his wistful child-face presently became known to dealers, and many a cheap lot was knocked down to him with amiable haste by friendly auctioneers. Then and there began that life-long love and loyalty to the grand old masters of Germany and Italy, to Albrecht Dürer, to Michel Angelo, to Raffaelle, which knew no diminution, and which, in its very commencement, revealed the eclecticism of true genius, because the giants were not the gods in those days.
But there came a time when Pegasus must be broken in to drudgery, and travel along trodden ways. By slow, it cannot be said by toilsome ascent, 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 chambers where they had lain so long in silent state, and smiled with their olden grace. Shades of nameless poets, who had wrought their souls into a cathedral and died unknown and unhonored, passed before the dreaming boy, and claimed their immortality. Nay, once the Blessed Face shone through the cloistered twilight, and the Twelve stood roundabout. In this strange solitude and stranger companionship many an old problem untwined its Gordian knot, and whispered along its loosened length,—
"I give you the end of a golden string:
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate,
Built in Jerusalem wall."
To an engraving of "Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion," executed at this time, he appends,—"This is one of the Gothic artists who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins; of whom the world was not worthy. Such were the Christians in all ages."
Yet, somewhere, through mediæval gloom and modern din, another spirit breathed upon him,—a spirit of green woods and blue waters, the freshness of May mornings, the prattle of tender infancy, the gambols of young lambs on the hill-side. From his childhood, Poetry walked hand in hand with Painting, and beguiled his loneliness with wild, sweet harmonies. Bred up amid the stately, measured, melodious platitudes of the eighteenth century, that Golden Age of commonplace, he struck down through them all with simple, untaught, unconscious directness, and smote the spring of ever-living waters. Such wood-notes wild as trill in Shakspeare's verse sprang from the stricken chords beneath his hand. The little singing-birds that seem almost to have leaped unbidden into life among the gross creations of those old Afreets who
"Stood around the throne of Shakspeare,
Sturdy, but unclean,"
carolled their clear, pure lays to him, and left a quivering echo. Fine, fleeting fantasies we have, a tender, heartfelt, heart-reaching pathos, laughter that might at any moment tremble into tears, eternal truths, draped in the garb of quaint and simple story, solemn fervors, subtile sympathies, and the winsomeness of little children at their play,—sometimes glowing with the deepest color, often just tinged to the pale and changing hues of a dream, but touched with such coy grace, modulated to such free, wild rhythm, suffused with such a delicate, evanishing loveliness, that they seem scarcely to be the songs of our tangible earth, but snatches from fairy-land. Often rude in form, often defective in rhyme, and not unfrequently with even graver faults than these, their ruggedness cannot hide the gleam of the sacred fire. "The Spirit of the Age," moulding her pliant poets, was wiser than to meddle with this sterner stuff. From what hidden cave in Rare Ben Jonson's realm did the boy bring such an opal as this
SONG
"My silks and fine array,
My smiles and languished air,
By Love are driven away;
And mournful, lean Despair
Brings me yew to deck my grave:
Such end true lovers have!
"His face is fair as heaven,
Where springing buds unfold;
Oh, why to him was 't given,
Whose heart is wintry cold?
His breast is Love's all-worshipped tomb,
Where all Love's pilgrims come.
"Bring me an axe and spade,
Bring me a winding-sheet;
When I my grave have made,
Let winds and tempests beat:
Then down I'll lie, as cold as clay.
True love doth pass away."
What could the Spirit of the Age hope to do with a boy scarcely yet in his teens, who dared arraign her in such fashion as is set forth in his address
TO THE MUSES
"Whether on Ida's shady brow,
Or in the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the Sun, that now
From ancient melody have ceased;
"Whether in heaven ye wander fair,
Or the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue regions of the air,
Where the melodious winds have birth;
"Whether on crystal rocks ye rove
Beneath the bosom of the sea,
Wandering in many a coral grove,
Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry;
"How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoyed in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move,
The sound is forced, the notes are few."
Whereabouts in its Elegant Extracts would a generation that strung together sonorous couplets, and compiled them into a book to Enforce the Practice of Virtue, place such a ripple of verse as this?—
"Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he, laughing, said to me:
"'Pipe a song about a lamb!'
So I piped with merry cheer.
'Piper, pipe that song again!'
So I piped; he wept to hear.
"'Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer!'
So I sang the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.
"'Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read!'
So he vanished from my sight.
And I plucked a hollow reed,
"And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear."
A native of the jungle, leaping into the fine drawing-rooms of Cavendish Square, would hardly create more commotion than such a poem as "The Tiger," charging in among Epistles to the Earl of Dorset, Elegies describing the Sorrow of an Ingenuous Mind, Odes innumerable to Memory, Melancholy, Music, Independence, and all manner of odious themes.
"Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Framed thy fearful symmetry?
"In what distant deeps or skies
Burned that fire within thine eyes?
On what wings dared he aspire?
What the hand dared seize the fire?
"And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
When thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand formed thy dread feet?
"What the hammer, what the chain,
Knit thy strength and forged thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dared thy deadly terrors clasp?
"When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?"
Mrs. Montagu, by virtue of the "moral" in the last line, may possibly have ventured to read the "Chimney-Sweeper" at her annual festival to those swart little people; but we have not space to give the gem a setting here; nor the "Little Black Boy," with its matchless, sweet child-sadness. Indeed, scarcely one of these early poems—all written between the ages of eleven and twenty—is without its peculiar, and often its peerless charm.
Arrived at the age of twenty-one, he finished his apprenticeship to Basire, and began at once the work and worship of his life,—the latter by studying at the Royal Academy, the former by engraving for the booksellers. Introduced by a brother-artist to Flaxman, he joined him in furnishing designs for the famous Wedgwood porcelain, and so one dinner-set gave bread and butter to genius, and nightingales' tongues to wealth. That he was not a docile, though a very devoted pupil, is indicated by his reply to Moser, the keeper, who came to him, as he was looking over prints from his beloved Raffaelle and Michel Angelo, and said, "You should not study these old, hard, stiff, and dry, unfinished works of Art: stay a little, and I will show you what you should study." He brought down Le Brun and Rubens. "How did I secretly rage!" says Blake. "I also spake my mind! I said to Moser, 'These things that you call finished are not even begun; how, then, can they be finished?'" The reply of the startled teacher is not recorded. In other respects, also, he swerved from Academical usage. Nature, as it appeared in models artificially posed to enact an artificial part, became hateful to him, seemed to him a caricature of Nature, though he delighted in the noble antique figures.
Nature soon appeared to him in another shape, and altogether charming. A lively miss to whom he had paid court showed herself cold to his advances; which circumstance he was one evening bemoaning to a dark-eyed, handsome girl,—(a dangerous experiment, by the way,)—who assured him that she pitied him from her heart. "Do you pity me?" he eagerly asked. "Yes, I do, most sincerely." "Then I love you for that," replied the new Othello to his Desdemona; and so well did the wooing go that the dark-eyed Catharine presently became his wife, the Kate of a forty-five years' marriage. Loving, devoted, docile, she learned to be helpmeet and companion. Never, on the one side, murmuring at the narrow fortunes, nor, on the other, losing faith in the greatness to which she had bound herself, she not only ordered well her small household, but drew herself up within the range of her husband's highest sympathy. She learned to read and write, and to work off his engravings. Nay, love became for her creative, endowed her with a new power, the vision and the faculty divine, and she presently learned to design with a spirit and a grace hardly to be distinguished from her husband's. No children came to make or mar their harmony; and from the summer morning in Battersea that placed her hand in his, to the summer evening in London that loosed it from his dying grasp, she was the true angel-vision, Heaven's own messenger to the dreaming poet-painter.
Being the head of a family, Blake now, as was proper, went into "society." And what a society it was to enter! And what a man was Blake to enter it! The society of President Reynolds, and Mr. Mason the poet, and Mr. Sheridan the play-actor, and pompous Dr. Burney, and abstract Dr. Delap,—all honorable men; a society that was dictated to by Dr. Johnson, and delighted by Edmund Burke, and sneered at by Horace Walpole, its untiring devotee: a society presided over by Mrs. Montagu, whom Dr. Johnson dubbed Queen of the Blues; Mrs. Carter, borrowing, by right of years, her matron's plumes; Mrs. Chapone, sensible, ugly, and benevolent; the beautiful Mrs. Sheridan; the lively, absurd, incisive Mrs. Cholmondeley; sprightly, witty Mrs. Thrale; and Hannah More, coiner of guineas, both as saint and sinner: a most piquant, trenchant, and entertaining society it was, and well might be, since the bullion of genius was so largely wrought into the circulating medium of small talk; but a society which, from sheer lack of vision, must have entertained its angels unawares. Such was the current which caught up this simple-hearted painter, this seer of unutterable things, this "eternal child,"—caught him up only to drop him, with no creditable, but with very credible haste. As a lion, he was undoubtedly thrice welcome in Rathbone Place; but when it was found that the lion would not roar there gently, nor be bound by their silken strings, but rather shook his mane somewhat contemptuously at his would-be tamers, and kept, in their grand saloons, his freedom of the wilderness, he was straightway suffered to return to his fitting solitudes. One may imagine the consternation that would be caused by this young fellow turning to Mrs. Carter, whose "talk was all instruction," or to Mrs. Chapone, bent on the "improvement of the mind," or to Miss Streatfield, with her "nose and notions à la Grecque," and abruptly inquiring, "Madam, did you ever see a fairy's funeral?" "Never, Sir!" responds the startled Muse. "I have," pursues Blake, as calmly as if he were proposing to relate a bon mot which he heard at Lady Middleton's rout last night. "I was walking alone in my garden last night: there was great stillness among the branches and flowers, and more than common sweetness in the air. I heard a low and pleasant sound, and knew not whence it came. At last I saw the broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures of the size and color of green and gray grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose-leaf, which they buried with songs, and then disappeared. It was a fairy funeral." Or they are discussing, somewhat pompously, Herschel's late discovery of Uranus, and the immense distances of heavenly bodies, when Blake bursts out uproariously, "'Tis false! I was walking down a lane the other day, and at the end of it I touched the sky with my stick." Truly, for this wild man, who 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 beast, and wish to beat him." No equivocation here, surely. On superstition he comments,—"It has been long a bugbear, by reason of its having been united with hypocrisy. But let them be fairly separated, and then superstition will be honest feeling, and God, who loves all honest men, will lead the poor enthusiast in the path of holiness." Herein lies the germ of a truth. Again, Lavater says,—"A great woman not imperious, a fair woman not vain, a woman of common talents not jealous, an accomplished woman who scorns to shine, are four wonders just great enough to be divided among the four corners of the globe." Whereupon Blake adds,—"Let the men do their duty, and the women will be such wonders; the female life lives from the life of the male. See a great many female dependents, and you know the man." If this be madness, would that the madman might have bitten all mankind before he died! To the advice, "Take here the grand secret, if not of pleasing all, yet of displeasing none: court mediocrity, avoid originality, and sacrifice to fashion," he appends, with an evident reminiscence of Rathbone Place, "And go to hell."
But this private effervescence was not enough; and long thinking anxiously as to ways and means, suddenly, in the night, Robert stood before him, and revealed to him a secret by which a facsimile of poetry and design could be produced. On rising in the morning, Mrs. Blake was sent out with a half-crown to buy the necessary materials, and with that he began an experiment which resulted in furnishing his principal means of support through life. It consisted in a species of engraving in relief both of the words and the designs of his poems, by a process peculiar and original. From his plates he printed off in any tint he chose, afterwards coloring up his designs by hand. Joseph, the sacred carpenter, had appeared in a vision, and revealed to him certain secrets of coloring. Mrs. Blake delighted to assist him in taking impressions, which she did with great skill, in tinting the designs, and in doing up the pages in boards; so that everything, except manufacturing the paper, was done by the poet and his wife. Never before, as his biographer justly remarks, was a man so literally the author of his own book. If we may credit the testimony that is given, or even judge from such proofs as Mr. Gilchrist's book can furnish, these works of his hands were exquisitely beautiful. The effect of the poems imbedded in their designs is, we are told, quite different from their effect set naked upon a blank page. It was as if he had transferred scenery and characters from that spirit-realm where his own mind wandered at will; and from wondrous lips wondrous words came fitly, and with surpassing power. Confirmation of this we find in the few plates of "Songs of Innocence" which have been recovered. Shorn of the radiant rainbow hues, the golden sheen, with which the artist, angel-taught, glorified his pictures, they still body for us the beauty of his "Happy Valley." Children revel there in unchecked play. Springing vines, in wild exuberance of life, twine around the verse, thrusting their slender coils in among the lines. Weeping willows dip their branches into translucent pools. Heavy-laden trees droop their ripe, rich clusters overhead. Under the shade of broad-spreading oaks little children climb on the tiger's yielding back and stroke the lion's tawny mane in a true Millennium.
The first series, "Songs of Innocence," was succeeded by "Songs of Experience," subsequently bound in one volume. Then came the book of "Thel," an allegory, wherein Thel, beautiful daughter of the Seraphim, laments the shortness of her life down by the River of Adona, and is answered by the Lily of the Valley, the Little Cloud, the Lowly Worm, and the Clod of Clay; the burden of whose song is—
"But how this is, sweet maid, I know not, and I cannot know,
I ponder, and I cannot ponder: yet I live and love!"
The designs give the beautiful daughter listening to the Lily and the Cloud. The Clod is an infant wrapped in a lily-leaf. The effect of the whole poem and design together is as of an "angel's reverie."
The "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" is considered one of the most curious and original of his works. After an opening "Argument" comes a series of "Proverbs of Hell," which, however, answer very well for earth: as, "A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees"; "He whose face gives no light shall never become a star"; "The apple-tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion the horse how he shall take his prey." The remainder of the book consists of "Memorable Fancies," half dream, half allegory, sublime and grotesque inextricably commingling, but all ornamented with designs most daring and imaginative in conception, and steeped in the richest color. We subjoin a description of one or two, as a curiosity. "A strip of azure sky surmounts, 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."
