Dear Sir,
I am very sorry for your immense loss, which is a repetition of what all feel in this valley of misery and happiness mixed. I send the shadow of the departed angel, and hope the likeness is improved. The lips I have again lessened as you advise and done a good many other softenings to the whole. I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the regions of my imagination; I hear his advice and even now write from his dictate. Forgive me for expressing to you my enthusiasm which I wish all to partake of, since it is to me a source of immortal joy, even in this world. By it I am the companion of angels. May you continue to be so more and more; and to be more and more persuaded that every mortal loss is an immortal gain. The ruins of Time build mansions in Eternity.
I have also sent a proof of Pericles for your remarks, thanking you for the kindness with which you express them, and feeling heartily your grief with a brother's sympathy.
I remain,
Dear Sir,
Your humble servant,
William Blake.
Lambeth, May 6th, 1800.
The Pericles in question is an outline engraving of a medallion in the Townly collection which forms the frontispiece to Hayley's Essay on Sculpture.
'The shadow of the departed angel,' here spoken of, may possibly be the sepia drawing, which subsequently passed into the hands of Mr. George Smith, and was by him bound up in a volume of Blakiana containing many other items of great interest. At the sale of that gentleman's library, at Christie's, April, 1880, this volume fetched £66.
As further consolation, Hayley resolved on ample memoirs of son and friend. To the biography of Cowper he was ultimately urged by Lady Hesketh herself. During one of his frequent flying visits to town, and his friends the Meyers, at Kew, in June, 1800, and while he, nothing loth, was being
