In the wake of this failure followed another.  Blake had been engaged to make twenty drawings to illustrate Ambrose Philips’s “Virgil’s Pastorals” for schoolboys.  The publishers saw them, and stood aghast, declaring he must do no more.  The engravers received them with derision, and pronounced sentence, “This will never do.”  Encouraged, however, by the favorable opinion of a few artists who saw them, the publishers admitted, with an apology, the seventeen which had already been executed, and gave the remaining three into more docile hands.  Of the two hundred and thirty cuts, the namby-pambyism, which was thought to be the only thing adapted to the capacity of children, has sunk to the level of its worthlessness, and the book now is valued only for Blake’s small contribution.

Of an entirely different nature were the “Inventions from the Book of Job,” which are pronounced the most remarkable series of etchings on a Scriptural theme that have been produced since the days of Rembrandt and Albrecht Duerer.  Of these drawings we have copies in the second volume of the “Life,” from which one can gather something of their grandeur, their bold originality, their inexhaustible and often terrible power.  His representations of God the Father will hardly accord with modern taste, which generally eschews all attempt to embody the mind’s conceptions of the Supreme Being; but Blake was far more closely allied to the ancient than to the modern world.  His portraiture and poetry often remind us of the childlike familiarity—­not rude in him, but utterly reverent—­which was frequently, and sometimes offensively, displayed in the old miracle and moral plays.

These drawings, during the latter part of his life, secured him from actual want.  A generous friend, Mr. Linnell, himself a struggling young artist, gave him a commission, and paid him a small weekly stipend:  it was sufficient to keep the wolf from the door, and that was enough:  so the wolf was kept away, his lintel was uncrossed ’gainst angels.  It was little to this piper that the public had no ear for his piping,—­to this painter, that there was no eye for his pictures.

  “His soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.”

He had but to withdraw to his inner chamber, and all honor and recognition awaited him.  The pangs of poverty or coldness he never experienced, for his life was on a higher plane:—­

  “I am in God’s presence night and day,
  He never turns his face away.”

When a little girl of extraordinary beauty was brought to him, his kindest wish, as he stood stroking her long ringlets, was, “May God make this world to you, my child, as beautiful as it has been to me!” His own testimony declares,—­

  “The angel who presided at my birth
  Said,—­’Little creature, formed of joy and mirth,
  Go, love without the help of anything on earth!’”

But much help from above came to him.  The living lines that sprung beneath his pencil were but reminiscences of his spiritual home.  Immortal visitants, unseen by common eyes, hung enraptured over his sketches, lent a loving ear to his songs, and left with him their legacy to Earth.  There was no looking back mournfully on the past, nor forward impatiently to the future, but a rapturous, radiant, eternal now.  Every morning came heavy-freighted with its own delights; every evening brought its own exceeding great reward.