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 a 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!