indeed, only with his “grateful obedience.”  Such claims are not out of place in the instance of one who “saw God”; who often “conversed familiarly with Jesus Christ”; who “was” Socrates; who argued conclusions for hours at a time with Moses, with Milton, with Dante, with the Biblical prophets, with Voltaire; who could “see Satan” almost at will—­all in vivid conceptions that sprang up in his mind with such force as to set seemingly substantial and even speaking beings before him.  In his assumption of the seer, Blake was not a charlatan:  he believed fully in his supernatural privileges.  To him his modest London lodging held great company, manifest in the spirit.

Blake’s greater “prophetic” writings ended, he busied himself with painting and illustration.  He was incessant in industry; indeed, his ordinary recreation at any time was only a change of work from one design to another.  So were wrought out the (incomplete) series of plates for Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’; the drawings for Hayley’s ’Life of Cowper,’ and for the same feeble author’s ’Ballads on Anecdotes relating to Animals’; the ‘Dante’ designs:  the ‘Job’ series of prints; a vast store of aquarelle and distemper paintings and plates, and a whole gallery of “portraits” derived from sitters of distinction in past universal history.  These sitters, it is needless to say, were wholly invisible to other eyes than Blake’s.  The subjects vary from likenesses of Saint Joseph and the Virgin Mary to those of Mahomet and Shakespeare.  Sundry of the old masters, Titian included, reviewed his efforts and guided his brush!  Such assertions do not ill accord with the description of his once seeing a fairy’s funeral, or that he first beheld God when four years old.

But all his fantasies did not destroy his faith in the fundamentals of orthodoxy.  He never ceased to be a believer in Christianity.  His convictions of a revealed religion were reiterated.  While incessant in asserting that he had a solemn message-spiritual to his day and generation, he set aside nothing significant in the message of the Scriptures.  There is something touching in the anecdote of him and his devoted Kate told by the portrait-painter Richmond.  Himself discouraged with his imperfect work, Richmond one day visited Blake and confessed his low mood.  To his astonishment, Blake turned to his wife suddenly, and said, “It is just so with us, is it not, for weeks together, when the visions forsake us!  What do we do then, Kate?” “We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake.”

So passed Blake’s many years, between reality and dream, labors and chimeras.  The painter’s life was not one of painful poverty.  He and his Kate needed little money; and the seer-husband’s pencils and burin, or the private kindness so constantly shown him, provided daily bread.  Despite the visions and inspirations and celestial phenomena that filled his head, Blake withal was sane enough in everyday concerns.  He lived orderly, even if he thought