ÆT. 44—46.]
LETTERS TO BUTTS.
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'We eat little, we drink less;
'This earth breeds not our happiness.
'Another sun feeds our life's streams;
'We are not warmed with thy beams.
'Thou measui-est not the time to me,
'Nor yet the space that I do see:
'My mind is not with thy light array'd;
'Thy terrors shall not make me afraid.'
When I had my defiance given,
The sun stood trembling in heaven;
The moon, that glow'd remote below,
Became leprous and white as snow;
And every soul of man on the earth
Felt affliction, and sorrow, and sickness, and dearth.
Los flam'd in my path, and the sun was hot
With the bows of my mind and the arrows of thought:
My bowstring fierce with ardour breathes.
My arrows glow in their golden sheaves;
My brother and father march before,
The heavens drop with human gore.
Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight.
And threefold in soft Beulah's night.
And twofold always. May God us keep
From single vision, and Newton's sleep!
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I also enclose you some ballads by Mr. Hayley, with prints to them by your humble servant. I should have sent them before now, but could not get anything done for you to please myself; for I do assure you that I have truly studied the two little pictures I now send, and do not repent of the time I have spent upon them.
God bless you! Yours, W. B.
Next year, in an extract from Hayley's Diary, we again get sight of Blake for a moment:—26th and 29th of March, 1803—'Read the death of Klopstock in the newspaper of the day, and looked into his Messiah, both the original and the translation. Read Klopstock into English to Blake, and translated the opening of his third canto, where he speaks of his own death.' Hayley was at this time trying to learn German, 'finding that it contained a poem on the Four Ages of Woman,' of which he, 'for some time, made it a rule to
