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.”

We have not space to give a description, scarcely even a catalogue, of Blake’s numerous works.  Wild, fragmentary, gorgeous dreams they are, tangled in with strange allegoric words and designs, that throb with their prisoned vitality.  The energy, the might, the intensity of his lines and figures it is impossible for words to convey.  It is power in the fiercest, most eager action,—­fire and passion, the madness and the stupor of despair, the frenzy of desire, the lurid depths of woe, that thrill and rivet you even in the comparatively lifeless rendering of this book.  The mere titles of the poems give but a slight clue to their character.  Ideas are upheaved in a tossing surge of words.  It is a mystic, but lovely Utopia, into which “The Gates of Paradise” open.  The practical name of “America” very faintly foreshadows the Ossianic Titans that glide across its pages, or the tricksy phantoms, the headlong spectres, the tongues of flame, the folds and fangs of symbolic serpents, that writhe and leap and dart and riot there.  With a poem named “Europe,” we should scarcely expect for a frontispiece the Ancient of Days, in unapproached grandeur, setting his “compass upon the face of the Earth,”—­a vision revealed to the designer at the top of his own staircase.

Small favor and small notice these works secured from the public, which found more edification in the drunken courtship and brutal squabbles of “the First Gentleman of Europe” than in Songs of Innocence or Sculptures for Eternity.  The poet’s own friends constituted his public, and patronized him to the extent of their power.  The volume of Songs he sold for thirty shillings and two guineas.