INTRODUCTION.

EARLY in the eighteenth century a certain John O'Neil got into debt and difficulties, these latter apparently political to some extent; and escaped both by marrying a woman named Ellen Blake, who kept a shebeen at Rathmines, Dublin, and taking her name. He had a son James by a previous wife or mistress, and this son took also the name of Blake, and in due course married, settled in London as a hosier, and became the father of five children, one of whom was the subject of this memoir. John O'Neil had also a son by his wife Ellen; and this son, settling in Malaga, in Spain, entered the wine trade, and became the founder of a family who proudly remember the tradition of their relationship to the mystic and seer. James Blake was living over his shop at 28, Broad Street, Golden Square, when, in the year 1757, his son William Blake was born. He had already a son John, the best beloved of father and mother, who grew up to be the black sheep of the family, and he begot afterwards James, who was to pester William with what Tatham calls 'bread and

cheese advice,' and Robert, whom William came to love like his own soul, and a daughter, of whom we hear little, and among that little not even her name. This family grew up among ideas less conventional than might be looked for in the house of a small shopkeeper. Swedenborgianism was then creeping into England, and the hosier's shop was one of the places where it had found shelter. The prophecies and visions of the new illumination were doubtless a very common subject of talk about the tea-table at night, and must have found ready welcome from William Blake. One prophecy certainly did sink into his mind. Swedenborg had said that the old world ended, and the new begar, in the year 1757. From that day forward the cld theologies were rolled up like a scroll, and the new Jerusalem come upon the earth. How often this prophecy concerning the year of his birth may have rung in the ears of William Blake we know not; but certainly it could hardly have done other than ring there, when his strange gift began to develop and fill the darkness with shadowy faces and the green meadows with phantom footsteps. He must often have thought that so strange a faculty may well have come not wholly unannounced, that it was the first glimmer of the great new illumination. In later life he called the seeing of visions being in Eden; and in his system Eden came again when the old theology

remembrance in the region of my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write from his dictates. Forgive me for expressing to you my enthusiasm, which I wish all to partake of, since it is to me a source of immortal joy, even in this world. May you continue to be so more and more, and be more and more persuaded, that every mortal loss is an immortal gain. The ruins of time build mansions in eternity.' He set to work at directions of the spirit.

once to carry out the

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He had now a number of lyrics by him, and began at once printing "The Songs of Innocence.' He drew the pocms upon metal with a varnish chiefly composed of pitch and turpentine. The plate was then placed in a bath of acid, and all the parts not covered by the varnish deeply bitten, until writing and drawing stood up in high relief, ready for ink and roller. He then printed off the sheets in a press for which he paid, Mr. Linnell's diary tells us, forty pounds, and afterwards coloured, and in some cases gilded them by hand. All the clean legible text of song and prophecy was written backward upon the copper with marvellous accuracy and patience.

In 1789 appeared first 'The Songs of Innocence,' and then 'The Book of Thel,' illuminated missals of song in which every page is a window open in Heaven, but open not as in the days of Noah for the outpouring of the flood of time and space,' but that we may

look into 'the golden age,' and 'the imagination that liveth for ever,' and talk with those who dwell there by 'Poetry, Painting, and Music, the three powers in man of conversing with. Paradise which the flood did not sweep away.' Alas, the poems when printed in plain black and white, wonderful though they be, and full of exultant peace and joyous simplicity, give but a faint shadow of themselves as they are in Blake's own books, where interwoven designs companion them, and gold and yellow tints diffuse themselves over the page like summer clouds. The poems themselves are the morning song of his genius. The thought of the world's sorrow, and that indignation which he has called 'the voice of God,' soon began to make hoarse the sweetness, if also to deepen the music of his song. The third book that came from his press, 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,' dated 1790, has the fierce note which never after wholly died out of his work. It was followed in 1793 by The Visions of the Daughters of Albion,' 'America,' 'Europe,' 'Gates of Paradise,' and 'The Book of Urizen'; in 1794 by The Songs of Experience'; in 1795 by 'The Song of Los,' 'Ahania,' and in 1804 by 'Jerusalem' and 'Milton.' He wrote also a very long poem called 'Vala' somewhere between 1797 and 1804 or 1805, but did not publish it, probably because he shrank from the labour and expense. It is