the drawing as "a phrenzied sketch of some power-highly interesting, but not like."

She consulted him about where he would be buried. He chose Bunhill Fields. Perhaps it would be better to lie there, where his father, mother, aunt, and brother lay, but so far as his own feelings were concerned, she might bury him where she pleased. He chose for funeral service that of the Church of England.

As the mid-day passed on August 12, 1827, an uprising of joyous emotion seized him. He began to sing aloud new songs to new melodies, as he did in early days when the Songs of Innocence began and were sung to Mrs. Mathews at Rathbone Place. His voice was powerful. In his ecstasy he "made the rafters ring." He said of these songs, “My beloved, they are not mine! no, they are not mine!" Then, in happier mood than when he had spoken of their being divided, he told her that they would not be parted, and that he would always be there to take care of her. It appears that he did so. His convictions supported her mind and enabled her to live quietly and not feel too lonely, since he was always really near, and she died at peace. Even in a physical sense he took care of her. His books and drawings gave her the food she ate while waiting to cease to require to eat food.

Then silence fell. The colour of his face changed, and, so quietly that the watchers did not know the exact hour, he ceased to breathe.

"I have been at the death of a saint," said a neighbour who had come to help his wife in that last hour.

POSTSCRIPT

CUMBERLAND notes on the blank page of the letter dated 12th April 1827, here given in full, "He died August 12, 1827, in the back room on the first floor of No. 3 Fountain Court in the Strand, and was buried in Bunhill Fields Burying-ground on 17th of August in 25 feet from the north wall, No. 80."

Gilchrist says, "That particular part of the buryingground was not added till 1836; in 1827 it was occupied by houses, then part of Bunhill Row. On reference to the register now kept at Somerset House I find the grave to be numbered 77 east and west, 32 north and south. As it was an unpurchased common grave' (only a nineteen-shilling fee was paid), it was doubtless (to adopt the official euphemism for the basest sacrilege) used again, after the lapse of some fifteen years, as must have been the graves of

those dear to him."

When antiquaries of the future desire to identify the remains for a monument, the skull measurements, when verified by the cast of the head now in possession of Sir William Richmond (see Frontispiece to this volume), will give means for a complete and authoritative identification.

Mrs. Blake, when a widow, received a gift of £100 from the Princess Sophia, which she returned" with all due thanks, not liking to take or keep what, as it seemed to her, she could dispense with, while many to whom no chance nor choice was given might have been kept alive by the gift."

She lived chiefly by the sale of Blake's remaining books and works. Mr. Cary, the Dante translator, bought an Oberon and Titania, and Lord Egremont a group of Spenserian characters from the Faerie Queene.

Tatham says that Mrs. Blake coloured more of Blake's designs than was generally believed. He was useful to her in helping to find purchasers. When she died she bequeathed

all that remained to him, and he continued to sell them. He told Mr. W. M. Rossetti in 1862 that he had sold Blake's "works" for thirty years, and at about the same period said, when visiting Dr. Garnett, that he had "destroyed some of Blake's manuscripts and kept others by him, which he had sold from time to time."

He looked on Mrs. Blake with veneration, and relates touchingly how "she suffered the remains of her dear husband to leave the house" on the day of the interment, “. . . set out herself the refreshments of the funeral, and parted with him with a smile."

"For some time" after this she lived with and kept house for Tatham,-who was young enough to be her grandson,and then returned to the same lodgings where Blake had lived with her and where he had died; where constant sorrow caused her to suffer such pain when she took food that at last, after a specially bad attack lasting a day and a night, she died; grief, and grief only, having slowly killed her in four years. Tatham, Mr. Bird the painter, Mr. Denham the sculptor, Mr. and Mrs. Richmond, and another friend unnamed were at her funeral.

But though she died of no illness but bereavement, she did not lament or repine. Neither the thoughts of her last years, nor of the whole of her married life since her husband finished her education, can be understood unless we constantly remember how much in advance of his century he was in his intellectual perception of those actions of mind that differ from "corporeal understanding" as much as sight from hearing, and of the fact that they have their own region and atmosphere, as different from that of ordinary reason as ether from the atmospheric air that we breathe, and that conveys sound but not light.

We must not rashly consider that this occult mental power, which Blake called "Imagination," was like our ordinary imagination, though it had a kinship. It exceeds it sometimes as the fancied fourth dimension of space exceeds the usual three, has its own here and there, its own before and after, a Time where Successivity does not rule, and a Space where Place has other laws. So he called it Eternity, and by it the Real Blake is yet with us, his posterity, as he was with Catherine his widow.

INDEX

This index does not give every occurrence in the text of the words that it includes.
Where a subject is continued on consecutive pages its commencement only is indi-
cated. If a second or third reference is given, a break of one or more pages and a
resumption will usually be found. The words selected are chosen to make this
the foundation for a dictionary, not merely of Blake facts, but of Blake terms. The
latter, however, are more fully explained in the notes to the Chatto and Windus
edition of Blake's Poetical Works.