hine with a
metallic poisonous lustre?

And there is that tiny mezzotint in which we find ourselves at the
base of a rude little hill. The shock of the quaking earth, the silent
passing of the sheeted dead and the rush of the affrighted multitudes
tell us that a cosmic tragedy is at hand. In a flare of lightning we
see silhouetted against an angry sky three crosses at the top of a sad
little hill. It is a crucifixion infinitely more real, more intense
than Dore's. Another scene--also engraved by Le Keux: On a stony
platform, vast and crowded, the people kneel in sackcloth and ashes;
the heavens thunder over the weeping millions of Nineveh, and the Lord
of Hosts will not be appeased. Stretching to the clouds are black
basaltic battlements, and above rear white-terraced palaces as swans
that strain their throats to the sky. The mighty East is in penitence.
Or, Elijah is rapt to heaven in a fiery whirlwind; or God creates
light. This latter is one of the most extraordinary conceptions of a
great visionary and worthy of William Blake. Or Sadak searching for
the waters of oblivion. Alas, poor humanity! is here the allegory. A
man, a midget amid the terrifying altitudes of barren stone, lifts
himself painfully over a ledge of rock. Above him are vertiginous
heights; below him, deadly precipices. Nothing helps him but
himself--a page torn from Max Stirner is this parable. Light streams
upon the struggling egoist as he toils to the summit of consciousness.
Among the designs of nineteenth-century artists we can recall none so
touching, so powerful, so modern as this picture. Martin was not
equally successful in portraying celestial episodes, though his
paradises are enormous panoramas replete with architectural beauties.
His figures, as exemplified in Miltonic illustrations, are more
conventional than Fuseli's and never naively original as are Blake's.
Indeed, of Blake's mystic poetry and divination Martin betrays no
trace. He is not so much the seer as the inventor of infernal
harmonies. Satan reviewing his army of devils is truly magnificent in
its depiction of the serried host armed for battle; behind glistens
burning Tophet in all its smoky splendour. Satan in shining armour
must be a thousand feet high; he is sadly out of scale. So, too, in
the quarrel of Michael and Satan over the sleeping Adam and Eve. Blake
is here recalled in the rhythms of the monstrous figures. Bathos is in
the design of Lucifer swimming in deepest h