sible child.

LIFE. Blake, the son of a London tradesman, was a strange, imaginative
child, whose soul was more at home with brooks and flowers and fairies than
with the crowd of the city streets. Beyond learning to read and write, he
received education; but he began, at ten years, to copy prints and to write
verses. He also began a long course of art study, which resulted in his
publishing his own books, adorned with marginal engravings colored by
hand,--an unusual setting, worthy of the strong artistic sense that shows
itself in many of his early verses. As a child he had visions of God and
the angels looking in at his window; and as a man he thought he received
visits from the souls of the great dead, Moses, Virgil, Homer, Dante,
Milton,--"majestic shadows, gray but luminous," he calls them. He seems
never to have asked himself the question how far these visions were pure
illusions, but believed and trusted them implicitly. To him all nature was
a vast spiritual symbolism, wherein he saw elves, fairies, devils,
angels,--all looking at him in friendship or enmity through the eyes of
flowers and stars:

With the blue sky spread over with wings,
And the mild sun that mounts and sings;
With trees and fields full of fairy elves,
And little devils who fight for themselves;
With angels planted in hawthorne bowers,
And God himself in the passing hours.

And this curious, pantheistic conception of nature was not a matter of
creed, but the very essence of Blake's life. Strangely enough, he made no
attempt to found a new religious cult, but followed his own way, singing
cheerfully, working patiently, in the face of discouragement and failure.
That writers of far less genius were exalted to favor, while he remained
poor and obscure, does not seem to have troubled him in the least. For over
forty years he labored diligently at book engraving, guided in his art by
Michael Angelo. but inventing his own curious designs, at which we still
wonder. The illustrations for Young's "Night Thoughts," for Blair's
"Grave," and the "Inventions to the Book of Job," show the peculiarity of
Blake's mind quite as clearly as his poems. While he worked at his trade he
flung off--for he never seemed to compose--disjointed visions and
incomprehensible rhapsodies, with an occasional little gem that still sets
our hearts to singing:

Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Seekin