Edward Blake

“ And sure enough a few days later a good Grit follower overtaking the Honorable Edward on the broad walk remarked that it had been snowing hard. Mr. Blake, suddenly remembering the pointer he had received about cracking a joke, but having forgotten the cue, promptly replied, “Oh, it’s quite immaterial.” Mr. Blake was a great lawyer—a much greater lawyer than he was a politician.
When Hansard “Mixed” Metaphors. Sir Richard was a past-master of the art of invective; a scholarly speaker, his English was perfect, and he could flay a political opponent in five minutes by the clock. ”

“ Plainly, Sir Thomas.
Dagworth.
I've told him before, but his disorder
Makes him deaf.
Enter King Edward and Black Prince.
King.
Good-morrow, Generals; when English courage fails,
Down goes our right to France.
But we are conquerors everywhere; nothing
Can stand our soldiers; each man is worthy
Of a triumph. Such an army of heroes
Ne'er shouted to the Heavens, nor shook the field. ”

“ Weaving the winding-sheet of Edward's race by means of sounds of spiritual music, and its accompanying expressions of articulate speech, is a bold, and daring, and most masterly conception, that the public have embraced and approved with avidity. Poetry consists in these conceptions; and shall Painting be confined to the sordid drudgery of fac-simile representations of merely mortal and perishing substances, and not be, as poetry and music are, elevated into its own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception? ”

“ Sir William Scott, now Lord Stowell, decided and directed the interment without any extra fee, as this question was raised by an undertaker; those undertakers who have IRON COFFINS must divide the profits of the funeral with Edward Lillie Bridgman. ”

“ A Traveller treats of "The Thugs of India" and afterwards of "Funeral Rites in the East" and religious novels are discussed. Venerable William and Mary is burned a short time before a celebration there, on its 166th aniversary, to which Hon. Edward Everett had been invited. He sends a reply, full of interest and sympathy. Bishop Percy's "Reliques of Ancient Romance Poetry" is reviewed. ”

“ Some of the officers were sent to make enquiry at the different burying-grounds. The Office was crowded with men and women, who had some of their relatives buried on Sunday last, to see if they could recognize any of the bodies. They were brought up again on Thursday, and discharged.”
In 1822 the case of Rex v. Cundick was tried at Kingston Assizes, coram Graham. [20] This was an indictment for misdemeanour. A man named Edward Lee was executed in the parish of St. Mary, Newington; George Cundick was employed by the keeper of the gaol to bury the body of Lee, and for this he was paid. ”

“ Wm. N. Pendleton, of Lexington, Va., discourses upon the "Philosophy of Dress," an address he had prepared, by invitation, for the Athenæum. Mrs. Win. F. Ritchie did produce another work, entitled "Mimic Life." "The University of Virginia; its Character and Wants" are again frankly considered. Duychink's "Cyclopædia of American Literature" furnishes a sketch and portrait of Simms, and a picture of Woodlands.
Mr. Thompson is very enthusiastic over the eloquence of Edward Everett; first, in his oration, in Richmond, March 19, 1856, on "Washington," for the Ladies' Mount Vernon Association ”

“ The dampness of a house placed upon the earth without cellarage, on a low shore too, between the Downs and the sea, seriously affected Blake's health for a time, and caused his Kate severe ague and rheumatism, which lasted even after her return to the dryness of London.
And no less baneful to the inner life was constant intercourse with the well-meaning literary squire. It was not possible for the ardent and exalted nature of Blake, to whom poetry and design were the highest expression of religion, to breathe freely in an atmosphere of elegant trivialities and shallow sentiment. ”

“ The mingling of sound sagacity with the utmost licence of imagination showed itself at every hour of Blake's life. He would, at any moment, speak as he here writes, and was not a mere sensible mortal in the morning, and a wild visionary in the evening. Visionary glories floated before his eyes even while he stooped over the toilsome copper-plate. There was no pause or hiatus in the life-long wedding of spiritual and earthly things in his daily course; no giving the reins to imagination at one time more than other. ”

“ Does not prophet or hero always seem 'mad' to the respectable mob, and to polished men of the world, the motives of feeling and action being so alien and incomprehensible?
In a letter respecting Blake, addressed by the late James Ward, in June, 1855, to his son, George Raphael, the engraver, the venerable artist gave expression to an interesting view of his own—itself, some may think, tinged by eccentricity. 'There can be no doubt,' he writes, 'of his having been what the world calls a man of genius. ”

“ In such cases, the traces of past beauty do but heighten the melancholy of its utter ruin. Amid so much that was beautiful in her affectionate, wifely spirit, these externals were little noticed. To friends who remember Blake in Fountain Court, those calm, patriarchal figures of Job and his Wife in the artist's own designs, still recall the two, as they used to sit together in that humble room.
All I have met, who at any period of the poet-artist's life knew much of Blake, speak with affection of him. A sweet, gentle, lovable creature, say all; courageous too, yet not bitter. ”

“ He is not taught this; it comes to him as blossoms come to the spring, and is the first mark of his vocation. It was this inward thirst and longing that sent out the boy Blake into the fields and lanes, and among the surburban hills. The force of boyish imagination must have been stronger in him than in most, even of the children of genius, for, as early as the age of thirteen or fourteen, the conceptions of his mind began to assume an external form. He saw a tree sparkling in the sun, and discovered that it was filled with angels. ”

“ Once he saw a tree there “filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars”; and once, on a summer morning, he saw “the haymakers at work, and amid them angelic figures walking.” In his matter-of-fact fashion he recounted the first of these two visions on his return home, and his mother had to intervene to prevent the honest hosier and conscientious Nonconformist, his father, from thrashing him for telling a lie.
[Pg 119] At the age of ten Blake was journeying to and from the house in Broad Street to Mr. Paris’s academy in the Strand, taking drawing lessons. ”

“ His father, James Blake, kept a hosier’s shop in Broad Street, Golden Square; and from the scanty education which the young artist received, it may be judged that the circumstances of the family were not very prosperous. For the facts of William Blake’s early life the world is indebted to a little book, called A Father’s Memoirs on a Child, written by Dr Malkin in 1806. Here we learn that young Blake quickly developed a taste for design, which his father appears to have had sufficient intelligence to recognize and assist by every means in his power. ”

“ I too have a picture of my father and the copy of his first love-verses; but they have been mine long. Blake is a real name, I assure you, and a most extraordinary man, if he is still living. He is the Robert [William] Blake whose wild designs accompany a splendid folio edition of the "Night Thoughts," which you may have seen, in one of which he pictures the parting of soul and body by a solid mass of human form floating off, God knows how, from a lumpish mass (fac-simile to itself) left behind on the dying bed. ”

“ If I were asked to name a writer whose work conveys to one's mind, free of any admixture of rhetoric or of any alloy of cleverness, the very impact and shock of pure inspired genius, I would unhesitatingly name William Blake. One is strangely conscious in reading him of the presence of some great unuttered power—some vast demiurgic secret—struggling like a buried Titan just below the surface of his mind, and never quite finding vocal expression. ”

“ More apart from humanity even than the America, it is hard to trace out any distinct subject, any plan or purpose in the Europe, or to determine whether it mainly relate to the past, present, or to come. And yet its incoherence has a grandeur about it as of the utterance of a man whose eyes are fixed on strange and awful sights, invisible to bystanders. To use an expression of Blake's own, on a subsequent occasion, it is as if the 'Visions were angry,' and hurried in stormy disorder before his rapt gaze, no longer to bless and teach, but to bewilder and confound. ”

“ Mr. Blake uttering a cry sank on his knees before the drawer. "My God! My God!" was his only reply, "what are these?" Suddenly he rose, his whole form quivering, his eyes burning. "Where is Mrs. Daniels?" he cried, hastily advancing and pulling the bell. "I must see her at once. Send the house-keeper here," he ordered as Fanny smiling demurely made her appearance at the door.
"Mrs. Daniels is out," returned the girl, "went out as soon as ever you got up from dinner, sir."
"Gone out at this hour?"
"Yes sir; she goes out very often nowadays, sir." ”

“ Never once he despaired of his mission, never he doubted of the heavenly origin of his visions, or of his writings. "I may praise them, since I dare not pretend to be other than the secretary, the authors are in Eternity", Blake writes in a letter to Thomas Butts 1802 about the Prophetic books. And though poverty and want are at his door, he never makes concessions in order to see his books printed and earn a little money. With infinite patience and care he continues writing down his weird fancies and illuminating them with his fantastic drawings. ”

“ Reference obligingly made for me by the present editor, to the file of the Sussex Advertiser, at that date the only Sussex newspaper, discovers a report (16th Jan. 1804) of this singular trial; one its inditer little thought would ever become curious and interesting. The report is after the curt fashion of local journals in those backward days. 'William Blake, an engraver at Felpham, was tried on a charge exhibited against him by two soldiers for having uttered seditious and treasonable expressions, such as "D—n the king, d—n all his subjects, d—n his soldiers, they are all slaves ”

“ On the other hand, it is equally clear that no madness imputed to Blake could equal that which would be involved in the rejection of his work on this ground. The greatness of Blake’s mind is even better established than its frailty, and in considering the work that he has left we must remember that it is by the sublimity of his genius, and not by any mental defect, that he is most clearly distinguished from his fellows. With the publication of the Songs of Experience Blake’s poetic career, so far at least as ordinary readers are concerned, may be said to close. ”

“ It was not to be expected, however, that Blake could long continue to breathe freely in the atmosphere of elegant triviality and shallow sentiment which surrounded the literary squire. Kindly as he was, and unwearied in endeavours to serve, his entire incapacity to understand the artist's genius or appreciate his work except as an engraver, made the constant intercourse between them blighting to Blake's inner life and to the exercise of his creative faculty. ”

“ There can be no doubt that the true ideal is that which unites in equal strength the forming and all-energising imagination, and the solid body of external truth by which it is to manifest itself to the eye and mind. There are moments when the sincere devotee of Blake is disposed to claim for him a place as great as that occupied by Michael Angelo; when, carried away by the ravishment of his fiery wheels, the thought is lost beyond the confines of sense, and he seems "in the spirit to speak mysteries." ”

“ He projects himself into shapeless dreams, instead of into fair definite forms, as already in the Songs of Innocence he had shown that he could do; and hereafter will again in the tasks so happily prescribed by others:—the illustrations to Young, to Blair's Grave, to Job, to Dante. In these amorphous Prophecies are profusely scattered the unhewn materials of poetry and design: sublime hints are sown broad-cast. But alas! whether Blake were definite or indefinite in his conceptions, he was alike ignored. ”

“ During the execution of this congenial task Blake reports progress, in joyous mood, to Hayley, then absent on a visit to friends:—
Dear Sir,
Absorbed by the poets Milton, Homer, Camoens, Ercilla, Ariosto, and Spenser, whose physiognomies have been my delightful study. Little Tom has been of late unattended to, and my wife's illness not being quite gone off she has not printed any more since you went to London. But we can muster a few in colours and some in black which I hope will be no less favour'd tho' they are rough like rough sailors. We mean to begin printing again to-morrow. ”

“ September 3, 1801: (Hayley to Johnson again) * * * 'The good Blake is finishing, very happily, the plate of the poet's mother. He salutes you affectionately.' October 1, 1801: 'October, you see, is arrived, and you, my dear Johnny, will arrive, I trust, before half this pleasant month shall pass away; for we want you as a faithful coadjutor in the turret, more than I can express. I say we, for the warm-hearted indefatigable Blake works daily by my side, on the intended decorations of our biography. Engraving, of all human works, appears to require the largest portion of patience ”