LIFE.  Blake, the son of a London tradesman, was a strange, imaginative child, whose soul was more at home with brooks and flowers and fairies than with the crowd of the city streets.  Beyond learning to read and write, he received education; but he began, at ten years, to copy prints and to write verses.  He also began a long course of art study, which resulted in his publishing his own books, adorned with marginal engravings colored by hand,—­an unusual setting, worthy of the strong artistic sense that shows itself in many of his early verses.  As a child he had visions of God and the angels looking in at his window; and as a man he thought he received visits from the souls of the great dead, Moses, Virgil, Homer, Dante, Milton,—­“majestic shadows, gray but luminous,” he calls them.  He seems never to have asked himself the question how far these visions were pure illusions, but believed and trusted them implicitly.  To him all nature was a vast spiritual symbolism, wherein he saw elves, fairies, devils, angels,—­all looking at him in friendship or enmity through the eyes of flowers and stars: 

    With the blue sky spread over with wings,
      And the mild sun that mounts and sings;
    With trees and fields full of fairy elves,
      And little devils who fight for themselves;
    With angels planted in hawthorne bowers,
      And God himself in the passing hours.

And this curious, pantheistic conception of nature was not a matter of creed, but the very essence of Blake’s life.  Strangely enough, he made no attempt to found a new religious cult, but followed his own way, singing cheerfully, working patiently, in the face of discouragement and failure.  That writers of far less genius were exalted to favor, while he remained poor and obscure, does not seem to have troubled him in the least.  For over forty years he labored diligently at book engraving, guided in his art by Michael Angelo. but inventing his own curious designs, at which we still wonder.  The illustrations for Young’s “Night Thoughts,” for Blair’s “Grave,” and the “Inventions to the Book of Job,” show the peculiarity of Blake’s mind quite as clearly as his poems.  While he worked at his trade he flung off—­for he never seemed to compose—­disjointed visions and incomprehensible rhapsodies, with an occasional little gem that still sets our hearts to singing: 

    Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
      Who countest the steps of the sun;
    Seeking after that sweet golden clime
      Where the traveller’s journey is done;
    Where the youth pined away with desire,
      And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
    Rise from their graves, and aspire
      Where my sunflower wishes to go!