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WILLIAM BLAKE
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other world.' His eyes were prominent, 'large, dark, and expressive,' says Allan Cunningham; the flashing of his eyes remained in the memory of an old man who had seen him in court at Chichester in 1804. His nose, though 'snubby,' as he himself describes it, had 'a little clenched nostril, a nostril that opened as far as it could, but was tied down at the end.' The mouth was large and sensitive; the forehead, larger below than above, as he himself noted, was broad and high; and the whole face, as one sees it in what is probably the best likeness we have, Linnells miniature of 1827, was full of irregular splendour, eager, eloquent, ecstatic; eyes and mouth and nostrils all as if tense with a continual suction, drinking up 'large draughts of intellectual day' with impatient haste. 'Infinite impatience,' says Swinburne, as of a great preacher or apostle—intense tremulous vitality, as of a great orator seem—to me to give his face the look of one who can do all things but hesitate.'

After his marriage in August 1782 (which has been said to have displeased his father, though Tatham says it was 'with the appro-