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WILLIAM BLAKE'S

DARK-EYED KATE."

and refreshed him, and never more so than when, during the last twelve years of his life, his bodily strength was broken, and his spirit, though languid, yet ceased not from mental toil. The truth is," adds Professor Veitch, "that Sir William's marriage, his comparatively limited circumstances, and the character of his wife, supplied to a nature that would have been contented to spend its mighty energies in work that brought no reward but in the doing of it, and that might never have been made publicly known or available, the practical force and impulse which enabled him to accomplish what he actually did in literature and philosophy. It was this influence, without doubt, which saved him from utter absorption in his world of rare, noble, and elevated, but ever-increasingly unattainable ideas." Her industry was indefatigable, because the spirit of love sustained and animated it. Everything her husband sent to the press and all the courses of his lectures were written by her, either to dictation or from a copy. "The number of pages in her handwriting," says his biographer, "filled with abstruse metaphysical matter, original and quoted, bristling with propositional and syllogistic formulæ, that are still preserved, is perfectly marvellous."

It is a commonplace to speak of William Blake, the painterpoet, as one of the most extraordinary men who ever lived. His genius had a mystical element in it, and hovered constantly on the threshold of a world of dreams and illusions. A vivid imagination so completely possessed him that he came to regard all its images as realities, to give life and substance to its most fantastic creations. Like the Solitary in Bulwer Lytton's romance of "Zanoni," he was surrounded by visions; the air was full of the beings summoned into existence by his wayward fancy. One evening, to a friend who called upon him, he whispered :

"Disturb me not-I have a person sitting to me."

"I see no one," was the reply.

"But, sir, I do," answered Blake; "there he is, his name is Lot; you may read of him in the Scripture."

"Did you ever see a fairy's funeral?" said he, on another occasion, to his companion.

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Never, sir."

"I have; but not before last night. I was walking alone in my garden, there was a great stillness among the branches

A COMPANION OF SINGULAR PRUDENCE.

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and flowers, and a more than common sweetness in the air. I heard a low and pleasant sound, and I knew not whence it came. At last I saw the broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures of the size and colour of green and grey grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose-leaf, which they buried with songs, and then disappeared. It was a fairy funeral.” 1

Obviously a man of such extreme sensibility to mental impressions needed a companion of singular prudence; and such Blake found in his wife, Katherine Boultbee ("darkeyed Kate," as he calls her), whom he married when he was six-and-twenty. Their lot from first to last was poverty, but she never complained. She believed in her husband, in his genius, in his mystical verse and still more mystical designs ; she listened to his extravagant rhapsodies with as much faith as a votary of old to some Sybilline utterance. Of their double existence she supplied the sound, solid, practical prose. She ordered his household and prepared his frugal meals; she did more: she printed the impressions of his plates; she coloured them nimbly and skilfully; she herself made drawings, much in his own style and spirit; and whatever she did or suffered, she continued cheerful, patient, actively intelligent, and readily sympathetic. Many of Blake's masterpieces were produced in the small room which served him and his wife for kitchen, bedchamber, and study, where his only companion (except his visions), was his faithful Katherine, and his income never exceeded eighteen shillings a week. The end came at last, and by the dying man's bed sat the faithful wife in tears. "Stay, Kate!" exclaimed the fond enthusiast; "keep just as you are—I will draw your portrait, for you have ever been an angel to me." She obeyed; and the dying artist made a faithful likeness. As he waited, with sublime faith, for the great revelation, he chanted wild strange songs, of which both the words and the music sprang from the moment's inspiration. He grieved-it was his only grief-that he could no longer commit them to paper. "Kate," he said, "I am a changing man; I always rose and wrote down my thoughts, whether it rained, snowed, or shone; and you arose too and sat beside me-this can be no longer."

1 The reader will do well to refer to Mr. Algernon Swinburne's eloquent monograph upon Blake.

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SCHILLER AND HIS wife.

It was the fanciful belief of the ancients that when a noble wife departed, Proserpine welcomed her to the other world with a procession of the best and purest spirits, who strewed the way with flowers. Such a procession must surely have received the wife of the poet Schiller, who soothed that strong but restless genius by her intense devotion, and held him to his home by the sweet attraction of her presence. "To be united with a person," he says, "that shares our joys and our sorrows, that responds to our feelings, that moulds herself so pliantly, so closely to our humours, reposing on her calm and warm affection, to relax our spirit from a thousand distractions, a thousand wild wishes and tumultuous passions, to dream away all the bitterness of fortune in the bosom of domestic enjoyment-this is the true delight of life." So profoundly did he feel the bliss of happy wedlock, a bliss undisturbed by incompatibility of temper or opposition of taste, that he declared life to be quite a different thing by the side of a beloved wife. "Beautiful Nature !" he exclaimed; "I now for the first time fully enjoy it, live in it. The world again clothes itself around me in poetic forms; old feelings are again awakening in my breast. I look with a glad mind around me; . . . my existence is settled in harmonious tranquillity; not strained and impassioned, but peaceful and clear."1 She rendered no small service to the world who cast the flowers of love before the toiling feet of Friedrich Schiller.

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The extent to which a wife may elevate and ennoble her husband's life, bearing it up on the wing of her higher genius and more ardent sympathies, is illustrated by the story of Madame Roland. There can be no doubt that hers was a loftier nature than her husband's; that her intellect was more powerful, her enthusiasm more genuine, her fertility of conception and faculty of expression greater. Carlyle paints her as a queen-like burgher woman: beautiful, Amazonian-graceful to the eye-more so to the mind. Unconscious of her worth (as all worth is), of her greatness, of her crystal clearness; genuine, the creature of sincerity and nature, in an age of artificiality, pollutions, and cant; there, in her still completeness, in her still invincibility, the noblest of all these living Frenchwomen." Queen-like, indeed, in her bearing, her looks, her movements, in her lofty beauty; but still more 1 Carlyle, "Life of Schiller."