We pass over Blake's progress in his art, but may remark, from his biographer, that although he drew the Antique with great care, he thus early conceived a distaste for the study as pursued in Academies of Art. "Already 'life,'" says Mr. Gilchrist, "in so factitious, monotonous an aspect of it as that presented by a model artificially _posed_ to enact an artificial part--to maintain in painful rigidity some fleeting gesture of spontaneous Nature's--became, as it continued, 'hateful,' looking to him, laden with thick-coming fancies, 'more like death' than life; nay (singular to say), 'smelling of mortality'--to an imaginative mind! 'Practice and opportunity,' he used afterwards to declare, 'very soon teach the language of art;' as much, that is, as Blake ever acquired, not a despicable if imperfect quantum. 'Its spirit and poetry, centred in the imagination alone, never can be taught; and these make the artist:' a truism, the fervid poet already began to hold too exclusively in view. Even at their best--as the vision-seer and instinctive Platonist tells us in one of the very last years of his life (_MS. notes to Wordsworth_)--mere 'Natural objects _always did and do_ weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me!'"
Blake wrote many songs, to which he also composed tunes, sometimes singularly beautiful; these he would occasionally sing to his friends. His later verse, which he attached to his plates, was very enigmatical. Though he did not for forty years attend any place of divine worship, yet he was not a Freethinker nor irreligious, as has been scandalously represented. The Bible was everything with him. How he reverenced the Almighty, the following conclusion of his address to the Deity will show:--
"For a tear is an intellectual thing; And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King; And the bitter groan of a martyr's woe Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow."
And in his _Address to the Christians_:--
"I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven's gate, Built in Jerusalem's wall."
Blake was a diligent and enthusiastic student. The day he devoted to the graver and the night to poetry; he was utterly indifferent to the goods of this life, and used to say: "My business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes expressing god-like sentiments."
