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WILLIAM BLAKE
135

men. 'The whole outward visible World,' he tells us, 'with all its Being is a Signature, or Figure of the inward spiritual World; whatever is internally, and however its Operation is, so likewise it has its Character externally; like as the Spirit of each Creature sets forth and manifests the internal Form of its Birth, by its Body, so does the Eternal Being also.' Just as he gives us a naked Apollo for the 'spiritual form of Pitt' in the picture in the National Gallery, where Pitt is seen guiding Behemoth, or the hosts of evil, in a hell of glowing and obscure tumult, so he sees the soul of a thing or being with no relation to its normal earthly colour. The colours of fire and of blood, an extra-lunar gold, putrescent vegetable colours, and the stains in rocks and sunsets, he sees everywhere, and renders with an ecstasy that no painter to whom colour was valuable for its own sake has ever attained. It is difficult not to believe that he does not often use colour with a definitely musical sense of its harmonies, and that colour did not literally sing to him, as it seems, at least in a permissible figure, to sing to us out of his pages.