and printer and publisher.  His career in verse and prose began early.  In 1783 came forth the charming collection ’Poetical Sketches,’ juvenile as the fancies of his boyish days, but full of a sensitive appreciation of nature worthy of a mature heart, and expressed with a diction often exquisite.  The volume was not really public nor published, but printed by the kindly liberality of two friends, one of them Flaxman.  In 1787, “under the direction of the spirit of his dead brother,” Robert, he decided on publishing a new group of lyrics and fancies, ‘Songs of Innocence,’ by engraving the text of the poems and its marginal embellishments on copper—­printing the pages in various tints, coloring or recoloring them by hand, and even binding them, with his wife’s assistance.  The medium for mixing his tints, by the by, was “revealed to him by Saint Joseph.”

With this volume—­now a rarity for the bibliophile—­began Blake’s system of giving his literary works and many of his extraordinary artistic productions their form and being.  Like a poet-printer of our own day, Mr. William Morris, Blake insisted that each page of text, all his delicate illustrations, every cover even, should pass through his own fingers, or through those of his careful and submissive helpmeet.  The expense of their paper was the chief one to the light purse of the queerly assorted, thrifty pair.

In 1789 appeared another little volume of verses, ‘Songs of Innocence.’  This also was ushered into existence as a dual book of pictures and of poetry.  In 1794 came the ‘Songs of Experience,’ completing that brief lyrical trio on which rests Blake’s poetical reputation and his claim on coming generations of sympathetic readers.  To these early and exquisite fruits of Blake’s feeling succeeded a little book ‘For Children,’ the mystic volume ‘The Gates of Paradise,’ ’The Visions of the Daughters of Albion,’ ‘America, a Prophecy,’ Part First of his ‘Book of Urizen,’ and a collection of designs without text, treated in the methods usual with him, besides other labors with pencil and pen.

But the wonderful and disordered imagination of the artist and poet now embodied itself in a strange group of writings for which no parallel exists.  To realize them, one must imagine the most transcendent notions of Swedenborg mingled with the rant of a superior kind of Mucklewrath.  Such poems as ‘The Book of Thel,’ in spite of beautiful allegoric passages; ‘The Gates of Paradise’; ‘Tiriel,’ an extended narrative-fantasy in irregular unrhymed verses; even the striking ’Marriage of Heaven and Hell,’—­may be reckoned as mere prologues to such productions as ‘Jerusalem,’ ‘The Emanation of the Giant Albion.’  ‘Milton,’ and the “prophecies” embodied in the completed ‘Urizen,’ the ‘Europe,’ ‘Ahania,’ and ‘The Book of Los.’  Such oracular works Blake put forth as dictated to him by departed spirits of supreme influence and intellectuality, or by angelic intelligences, quite apart from his own volition;