a grain of sand or a blade of grass insignificant—much less an insignificant blur or mark.' The stones with which Achan has been martyred live each with a separate and evil life of its own, not less vivid and violent than the clenched hands raised to hurl other stones; there is menacing gesture in the cloud of dust that rises behind them. And these human beings and these angels, and God (sometimes an old bowed Jew, fitted into a square or lozenge of winged heads) are full of the energy of a life which is betrayed by their bodies. Sometimes they are mere child's toys, like a Lucifer of bright baubles, painted chromatically, with pink hair and blushing wings, hung with bursting stars that spill out animalculæ. Sometimes the whole man is a gesture and convulses the sky; or he runs, and the earth vanishes under him. But the gesture devours the man also; his force as a cipher annihilates his very being.
In greatness of conception Blake must be compared with the greatest among artists, but the difference between Blake and Michelangelo is the difference between the artist in whom imagination overpowers
