I am persuaded that She Alone is the Governor of Worldly Riches, and when it is Fit She will call on me. Till then I wait with Patience, in hopes that She is busied among my Friends.'
The employer is, no doubt, Mr. Butts, for whom Blake had already begun to work: we know some of the 'frescoes' and colour-prints which belong to this time; among them, or only just after, the incomparable 'Crucifixion,' in which the soldiers cast lots in the foreground and the crosses are seen from the back, against a stormy sky and lances like Tintoretto's. But it was also the time of all but the latest Prophetic Books (or of all but the latest of those left to us), and we may pause here for a moment to consider some of the qualities that Blake was by this time fully displaying in his linear and coloured inventions and 'Visions of Eternity.'
It is by his energy and nobility of creation that Blake takes rank among great artists, in a place apart from those who have been content to study, to observe, and to copy. His invention of living form is like nature's, unintermittent, but without the
