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