92. 93. 101. The leaden hue of plague is on the face of the central woe, and its fear-awakening eyes are bloodshot and streaming tears. Among its fellows of the grisly troop, two, flanking this salient horror, would haply reveal more fearful lineaments still, were not their dread faces buried in bowed despair. For long the vision of this confluence of mortal tribulation haunts the mind, which shudders as it recalls the giant strength of the fearful imagery. 'Ruin from man is most concealed when near, And sends the dreadful tidings in the blow.' A noble youth meets a maiden in trusted embrace, and kisses her; she, with treacherous hand stretched behind, stabs him in the back. Death, furious, with rushing stride, from both hands aims his darts. His giant form is vestured only in its own long hair and beard, amid which 'numerous ills' swarm thick, attendant on their awful lord. The Soul has flown on high, and, seated above the starry firmament, gazes, as insatiate with the reflection of God's glory in creation, upward to the dazzling light of the eternal throne. New hopes and joys are seen emanating from the entranced soul, ascending in form of delicate ethereal figures. 102. We give for Time eternity's regard.' Three fair females worship, kneeling before the fleeting figure of impartial Time, who passes them without respect. 103. 'Night assists me here.' 81. A grand design. The ponderous figure of Night seated upon a cloud. Over the full moon droop the solemn tresses of her silver hair. Her finger to her brow in silent cogitation. 'Where Sense runs savage, broke from Reason's chain, The beauty and terror of this design (which is included in the engraved selection) is here greatly enhanced by the colour of the green earth and hills and crimson sunrise (ever with Blake the portent of impending woe, as, for example, in the poem of the 'Angel' 'So he took his wings and fled, Then the morn blush'd rosy red. I dried my tears and armed my fears against which rises the lithesome figure of young Sense, exhila- 48. The Spirit walks of every day deceased.' A grand spirit figure, with towering wings, moving in slow sad step, with drooping hands and dejected head, the eyes fixed as in disconsolate grief. The whole of the winged form is white, with dark grey background relieving it. 50. Man flies from Time, and Time from Man.' Man speeding in one direction, Time flying in the opposite. Above the text appear two smaller figures, one mourning the too swift current of his days, the other overturning the too sluggish hour-glass. 107. 'Then welcome Death! thy dreaded harbingers Age and Disease.' 109. 146. 72. 74. I 20. 121. I22. Crimson artery and white nerve interlace in tangled maze, and coursing through man's curious framework we see, side by side, the fell associates, Age and Disease, in mutual action joined. Age with white beard and hands extended as if gently soothing the mortal system to its rest, and Disease distilling black poison through it from two vials. 'Death wounds to cure; we fall, we rise, we reign! Death, with kindly hand, unbinds the fetters which chain Man to the earth, whose liberated spirit, with expanded arms, springs exultingly upward, cleaving its path through the blue heaven. (End of Night the Second.) A Titan shade of Death casting down the mouldering wall which separates time from eternity. Another form of an invention frequent with Blake. A pale corpse lies below, stretched across the page, and bowed at its feet a solitary mourner. Rejoicingly springs the free soul upward, two angels escorting it, one of whom looks down with pitiful expression on the bereaved weeper. A female figure lying stretched in the last moments of life beside a troubled sea, beyond which the golden sun sinks down. On the upper margin stands a lamp, the smoke of its expired light ascending. 'Ah me too long I set, I set at nought The swarm of friendly Warnings which around me flew Man is seen surrounded by troops of friendly Warnings: some, rising from the earth, cling to him, entreating attention; one seeks to pluck his left hand, which wilfully he fastens against his side. Three heavenly messengers descend admonishing him with consentaneous action; these, with his right hand, he motions away. Again we see a crimson sunrise, ominous presage of the wrath which follows on stubborn blindness. A grand figure of an aged man, leaning eagerly forward, forgetful of his crutch and feebleness, to welcome the advent of The Friendly Foe,' whose pale immensity is seen towering against the dark mists which gather to obscure the sunlight of the earth. A seraph seated on a cloud, harping his holy numbers, to whom looks up the Christian poct, emulating the heavenly melody on his own lyre, while a group of earthly listeners hang entranced on his efforts. 54. Man sleeps, and Man alone.' 57. 32. The slumbering figure of Man is seen. In his sleep his Hours have flitted past unnumbered, as a linked chain of tiny, delicate forms, hand in hand, which vanishes in a dark cloud at one extremity, and at the other, suddenly snapped, the last Hour of the chain stretches out her hand towards a new-born Hour (at the other side of the page) never to be enjoyed by the dreamer, for it starts back on the verge of the cloud from which it has just emerged, as red lightnings, arrows, and swift-hurled shapes of woe descend upon the sleeper's head, fondly secure. 'The world, that gulf of souls, immortal souls, One flame-winged soul apparently engaged in groping in the shallows of a watery gulf for lost treasure, all unregardant of a fellow soul near him sinking in its depths, vainly, with flickering wings, struggling for deliverance, his eyes upraised to a descending angel who stretches out his hand to save. 'All pay themselves the compliment to think An aged man, crowned with cap and bell, reflecting on past follies, but still holding to the toy weathercock which has pleased his heedless life. The abandon of design in the trailing vine which enriches the upper margins of the page is delightful in its lively playfulness. NIGHT THE FIFTH. Title-page to 'The Relapse.' As Blake perceives the title of this canto there flashes on his vision the awful example of relapse which our Lord holds up in the warning words, 'Remember Lot's wife.' Looking behind, in the very instant of disobedience, smitten with her startled hands in the sudden action of horror at the sight of guilty Sodom's doom, her hair dishevelled as from unprepared flight, she stiffens on the plain, a white and glistening monument of Divine judgment. Afar are seen the domes and embattled wall of the city, beneath a sky red glowing like a furnace, and pouring down a storm of destroying flame. The momentary pause in the flight, and the shock of dismay, are rendered subservient to a monumental dignity in the figure which makes this design grandly impressive. 'The Muse Has often blushed at her degenerate sons.' The Muse of Poetry, bay crowned, with feet enchained to earth, sits piping gaily to a gross reclining figure of a crowned Venus holding a mirror, from whose side a Cupid aims his darts. Above the text a harp lies with a bow and quiver. 164. 166. 167. 172. 175. 179. 188. 190. 191. 'Man smiles in ruins, glories in his guilt, And infamy stands candidate for praise.' A laurel-crowned warrior, in black mail, stands, with arrogant air, pointing to his blood-stained sword, as claiming the reward of conquest; one iron foot is planted upon the head of an unarmed and prostrate victim. Night stoops from her seat amid the rolling spheres of the universe over the couch of an awakened and trembling sleeper, to whom she presents a tablet traced with solemn thoughts and memories by the style she holds in her right hand. A white and lovely figure of Divine poesy, stretching, with vessel upheld in both hands, to catch the dew of heavenly inspiration distilled from a blue starry sky. 'Delightful Gloom! the clustering thoughts around A wonderful design, significant of the fruitfulness of midnight meditations. Seated on a cloud, pure as from his Maker's hand, Man gathers fruit from a luxuriant vine that, rich with ripest clusters, embowers him beneath one great rainbow-like arch which sweeps across the starlit sky. Pale Grief, opening her endless scroll, aged and grey robed, instructs the tender young in the hard lessons of her school. Tears drip from overhanging clouds. 'Truth bids me look on men as autumn leaves, And all they bleed for as the summer's dust Sweeping through the air, a keen-eyed, eagle-nosed giant, his moustaches twirled in military guise, blows before him with huge serpent-mouthed trumpet, as a cloud of dust, both the flying and pursuing armies of contending inen. A tree, wind-bared of leaves, overhangs the page. 'Lorenzo, hast though ever weighed a sigh?' A mighty angel weighs together in a great balance a sunken and mourning female figure, against a stately crowned king, with orb and sceptre, all whose glory proves lighter than the oppressed one's sigh. 'That noble gift! that privilege of man From Sorrow's pang, the birth of endless joy.' A huddled figure of grey Penitence seated in gloom, from whose sad head, sunken between its knees, bursts a sudden birth of golden joy, fire-winged. 'Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted' is the key-note of this beautiful design. 'When the sick soul, her wonted stay withdrawn, Tenderly lovely and touching is this design, which Mr. Bain has caused to be well engraved in outline for private distribution. 194. 196. 197. 201. 205. Personified as a beautiful female figure, the Soul, heaven born, and 'trailing clouds of glory' which sweep in one grand curve upward round the page, against the pure blue sky, buries its face and soils its golden locks in the dust of this earth, a segment of its orb crossing the lower part of the drawing. 'What weakness see not children in their sires. A grandsire with time's snows thick on his head counting his cherished gold: his little granddaughter observant of his act. Behind, a younger child stretches out its hands to seize the perishable object of its desire, a butterfly, which has settled on a prickly plant. Man, as a shepherd, fatuously lying down to slumber on the very brink of an awful precipice, topples, driven off by the wind, and all unconscious of his fate, into the abyss below. His dog, by instinct wiser, sleeps securely far from the dangerous edge. Great cloud masses, magnificently designed, fill the righthand margin. A strong man clings to and pursues his way along the trembling thread of life, which alone sustains him in the midst of space. Seated on a cloud, Destiny, as grim and aged Fate, cuts the thread with remorseless shears. 'Give Death his due, the wretched and the old ; The attempt to give visible form to this metaphor treads on the limits of absurdity; still, so terribly in earnest is this giant presentation of the ancient pale one, as he sweeps before him a heap of infirm and aged beings, while the young and active fly from the fatal besom which he wields, that the mind yields to the daring simplicity of the designer without resentment. The spring of this design resembles that before noticed as No. 81, but is very inferior in beauty and power. Here, while gay pleasure-seekers, rose garlanded, dance to pipe and lyre, they are overshadowed by the Titan hand of Death, who, crowned with roses in mockery, stoops his pallid face above the festival. 208. When Fortune thus has toss'd her child in air.' 209. As a child a shuttlecock, so crowned Fortune tosses her transitory favourite, a youthful figure, into airy elevation, who, elated with his baseless post, recks not of the headlong fall through space of his predecessor in the favour of the fickle goddess. Ingenuity is exhausted in varied figures of the uncertainty of man's estate. In this we see a puny mortal, cradled in a lofty nest upon the topmost branches of a tall tree, which is seized and violently shaken by a wild and howling figure of a mighty wind. 'Though thou shouldst make thy nest as high as the eagle, I will bring thee down from thence, saith the Lord.' |