will show you what you should
study." He brought down Le Brun and Rubens. "How did I secretly rage!"
says Blake. "I also spake my mind! I said to Moser, 'These things that
you call finished are not even begun; how, then, can they be finished?'"
The reply of the startled teacher is not recorded. In other respects,
also, he swerved from Academical usage. Nature, as it appeared in models
artificially posed to enact an artificial part, became hateful to him,
seemed to him a caricature of Nature, though he delighted in the noble
antique figures.

Nature soon appeared to him in another shape, and altogether charming. A
lively miss to whom he had paid court showed herself cold to his
advances; which circumstance he was one evening bemoaning to a
dark-eyed, handsome girl,--(a dangerous experiment, by the way,)--who
assured him that she pitied him from her heart. "_Do_ you pity me?" he
eagerly asked. "Yes, I do, most sincerely." "Then I love you for that,"
replied the new Othello to his Desdemona; and so well did the wooing go
that the dark-eyed Catharine presently became his wife, the Kate of a
forty-five years' marriage. Loving, devoted, docile, she learned to be
helpmeet and companion. Never, on the one side, murmuring at the narrow
fortunes, nor, on the other, losing faith in the greatness to which she
had bound herself, she not only ordered well her small household, but
drew herself up within the range of her husband's highest sympathy. She
learned to read and write, and to work off his engravings. Nay, love
became for her creative, endowed her with a new power, the vision and
the faculty divine, and she presently learned to design with a spirit
and a grace hardly to be distinguished from her husband's. No children
came to make or mar their harmony; and from the summer morning in
Battersea that placed her hand in his, to the summer evening in London
that loosed it from his dying grasp, she was the true angel-vision,
Heaven's own messenger to the dreaming poet-painter.

Being the head of a family, Blake now, as was proper, went into
"society." And what a society it was to enter! And what a man was Blake
to enter it! The society of President Reynolds, and Mr. Mason the poet,
and Mr. Sheridan the play-actor, and pompous Dr. Burney, and abstract
Dr. Delap,--all honorable men; a society that was dictated to by Dr.
Johnson, and delighted by Edmund Burke, and sneered at by Horace
Walpole, its untiring devotee: a society presided