It was necessary even for the unwise man to grow fierce in the defence of falsehood, 'that enthusiasm and life may not cease.' He is unlikely to have thought out these matters in detail in the early days we write of; but few men have ever mirrored their temperament in their philosophy as clearly as he did, and to his philosophy, accordingly, we must turn again and again.

If Blake learned Nature in his long rambles southward in Surrey, and up northward by Wellings' Farm, he learned to know Art among the tombs and pointed ceilings of the Abbey. The Abbey spires stand as hieroglyphs for poetic inspiration in more than one of his later drawings. 'Gothic form,' he was wont to write, 'is living form'; and the shadows of the great cathedral may well have been the shelter that preserved him from the pseudo-classical ideals of his time. In some lines added at a later date to an engraving made now, he compares the Gothic cathedrals to the tomb of Christ. Christ was his symbolic name for the imagination, and the tomb of Christ could be no other than a shelter, where imagination might sleep in peace until the hour of God should awaken it. What more beautiful shelter could he have found than this ancient cathedral? Outside the 'indefinite' multitude brawled and pushed, and inside the 'definite' forms of art and vision congregated, and were at peace.

One day certain shapes, purporting to be the twelve Apostles, gathered about the altar; and doubtless many another vision appeared likewise, though he probably did not yet begin to think much about their meaning and their message. He was now busy with 'Edward III.' and other historical fragments, and may have caught something of his historical enthusiasm from the monuments about him. Another inspiration came to him in the works of Chatterton, who, five years his elder, had lately published the poems of 'T. Rowlie.' The 'Bard's Song,' at the end of Edward III.,' shows the influence of the English metamorphosis' very visibly. He must also have read Spenser and the Elizabethan dramatists. This was the only purely literary and purely artistic period of his life; for in a very short time he came to look upon poetry and art as a language for the utterance of conceptions, which, however beautiful, were none the less thought out more for their visionary truth than for their beauty. The change made him a greater poet and a greater artist; for the commandment 'lose thy life to save it' is not less true of the intellectual than of the moral life.

In his twentieth year his apprenticeship came to an end, and he began engraving and drawing upon his own account. Now, too, he made the acquaintance of Flaxman and Fuseli, who became his life-long friends, despite one short inter

ruption in the case of the first, brought about by a sudden descent of the tigers of wrath.' At this time also he began courting one Polly or Clara Woods, 'a lovely little girl,' who took walks with him here and there, and then whistled him down the wind.. Many of his descriptions of 'Vala' and other symbolic women, and some few of the illustrations to the 'Prophetic Books,' such as the false, smiling face at the bottom of one of the pages of 'Vala' (see 'The Works of William Blake,' page 5 of the lithographs from 'Vala'), and more than one of the lyrics, such as 'Love's Secret,' may conceivably owe their inspiration to her. Indubitably a certain type of feminine beauty, at once soft and cruel, emotional and egotistic, filled Blake with a mingled terror and wonder that lasted all his days. And there is no clear evidence of any other woman beside this Clara or Polly Woods and his own good wife, having come at all into his life. The impression made upon him by this girl was quite strong enough to have lasted on; for Tatham has recorded how his love for her made him ill, and how he had to be sent for change of air to the house of the market gardener, Boucher, at Richmond, where he met the girl he was to marry.

The market gardener had a pretty, 'brighteyed' daughter, named Catherine, who, whenever her mother asked her whom she would marry, was wont to answer, 'I have not yet

seen the man.' One night she came into the room where her family were sitting, and saw for the first time a new comer, with young, handsome face and flame-like hair-her own pencil sketch is the authority-and grew upon the moment faint, as the tale has it, from the intuition that she saw her destined husband. She left the room to recover, and upon her return sat down by Blake, and heard from his lips the story of his great love for the false beauty, and of her fickleness and his wretchedness. 'I pity you from my heart,' she cried. 'Do you pity me?' he answered; 'then I love you for that.' Humiliated by his ill-starred love, he was grateful for a little womanly kindness; and from such gratitude, not for the first time upon the earth, sprang a love that lasted until life had passed away. This pretty tale has reflected itself in the great mirror of the Prophetic Books.' In them Pity is ever the essential thing in a woman's soul. 'The Book of Urizen' describes thus the making of Enitharmon :

'Wonder, awe, fear, astonishment,

Petrify the eternal myriads

At the first female form, now separate :
They called her Pity, and fled.'

Enitharmon is 'the vegetable mortal wife of
Los; his emanation, yet his wife till the sleep
of death is passed.' And the symbolic being
Los, though he is Time, and more than one

:

other great abstract thing, is also Blake himself, as may be seen by even a rapid reading of 'Milton.'

When Blake had told Catherine Boucher that he loved her, he returned to his work for a year, resolved not to see her until he had put by enough to set up house upon. At the year's end, on August 13th, 1782, they were married, and began housekeeping at 51, Leicester Fields, now Leicester Square. Mrs. Blake, knowing neither how to read nor write, had to put her mark in the register. In the course of a few years she had profited so well by her husband's teaching that she probably learnt to copy out his manuscripts; for there is little doubt that a certain neat and formal handwriting which crops up here and there is hers, and she certainly helped to colour his illuminated books. She learnt even to see visions, beholding upon one occasion a long procession of English kings and queens pass by with silent tread. She had no children, but repaid her husband for the lack of childish voices by a love that knew no limit and a friendship that knew no flaw. In the day she would often take long walks with him, thirty miles at a stretch being no unusual distance, and (having dined at a wayside inn, return under the light of the stars; and often at night, when the presences bade him get up from his bed and write, she would sit beside him, holding his hand.