ests. There the tempest roars; here it howls. | I do not think the idea of the Banshee spirits could have arisen elsewhere than among the pines; nor that any mythology growing up among people inhabiting these forests could have omitted such supernatural beings from its theogony. But do not conclude that the gloom of the pine-woods clouded our spirits. So many trees had fallen where our tents were pitched that the sun got down there, and at night the moon looked in upon us, rising weird through a vista of dead and lonely tree-tops. Then, too, the brook was always singing in our ears-absolutely singing! The incessant tumble of the water and boiling of the eddies makes a heavy undertone like the surf, but the breaking of the current over the higher rocks and leaping of the foam down the cataracts, produce a distinctly musical sound,-a mystical ringing of sweet-toned bells. There is no mistaking this metallic melody, this clashing of tiny cymbals, and it must be this miniature blithe harmony which fine ears have heard on the beach in summer, where the surf broke gently. But these are drowsy fancies, and one night of such sleepless dreaming is about all a healthy man can afford out of a whole trip; and if he is not a healthy man he had better not go into the Wind River Mountains at all. Sometimes one is kept awake by worse disturbances than reveries, though not often. With complete composure, you sleep through a steady rain falling on the piece of canvas laid over your face, or in momentary expectation of being surprised by Indians. I have heard of a few camps in the old days having been run over by a stampede of buffaloes now and then, but this, fortunately, Now, few worse interruptions of this sort occur to rest than the tramping among the sleepers of mules, in their attempt to make some felonious attack upon the edible portion of the cargo, and this only occurs where pasturage is scant; once, camping near a Mexican pack-train of donkeys, we were thus greatly annoyed by those little brutes. Now and then, on the plains, coyotes venture close to camp, and, if they are very hungry, even come to the fireside in search of meat, and perhaps attempt to gnaw the straps off the saddle or boots your weary head reclines upon. Foiled in this, they adjourn to a respectful distance and set up prolonged and lugubrious howls, which Per either keep you awake altogether or attune your dreams to some horrible theme. haps I ought not to use the plural, since one coyote's voice is capable of noise enough to simulate a whole pack. No doubt it often happens that when a score seem howling in shrill concert, there is really but a single wolf raining his quick-repeated and varied cries upon our unwilling ears. These small wolves are justly despised by all Western men; but the big gray wolves are a different matter. However, I never saw them but once. While cougars and wolves and coyotes, and even Mexican burros, are rare infringers on the sacred privacy of your sleep, numerous "small deer" come to investigate the curious stranger who has stretched himself out in their domain. Rattlesnakes are extremely numerous over many parts of the West, and we used to fear that, with their love of warmth, they would seek the shelter of our bedding to escape the chill of the night; but I do not know of any such an unpleasant bed-fellow having been found by any of the survey people. I myself came pretty near to it, however, over on Cochetopa creek, in Colorado, one night, when I unwittingly spread my blankets over a small hole in the ground. Isnoozed on, unmindful of danger, but when I moved my bed in the morning, out from the hole crawled a huge rattler, whose doorway I had stopped up all night! He would better have stayed in, for big John of Oregon caught him by the tail and broke his stupid neck, before he had time to throw himself into a coil of vantage for the strike. If you camp in the woods you are certain of late visitors in the shape of mice and the ubiquitous and squeaky ground-squirrels, whose nocturnal rambles lead them all over your bed-covers; often, indeed, their rapid, sharp-toed little feet scud across your cheek, and their furry tails trail athwart the bridge of your nose and brush the dew from your sealed eyelids. To the thousand insects. rustling in the grass we never gave attention; and not even the most home-bred tenderfoot ever thought of cotton in his ears! How thus could he hear all the pleasant, faint voices speaking through the night so close about him? Thoreau, writing from his camp on a sloping bank of the Merrimac, has well described the sounds of the night: "With our heads so low in the grass, we heard ward, kissing the shore as it went, sometimes the river whirling and sucking, and lapsing downrippling louder than usual, and again its mighty current making only a slight, limpid, trickling sound, as if our water-pail had sprung a leak, and the water were flowing into the grass by our side. The wind, rustling the oaks and hazels, impressed us like a wakeful and inconsiderate person up at midnight, moving about, and putting things to rights, occasionally stirring up whole drawers full of leaves at a puff. There seemed to be a great haste and preparation throughout Nature, as for a distinguished visitor; all her aisles had to be swept in the night, by a thousand hand-maidens, and a thousand pots to be boiled for the next day's feasting;-such a whispering bustle, as if ten thousand fairies made their fingers fly, silently sewing at the new carpet with which the earth was to be clothed, and the new drapery which was to adorn the trees. And the wind would lull and die away, and we, like it, fell asleep again." But I am dwelling too long upon this rare wakefulness in camp, rather than the ordinary and business-like repose of the night. One's sleep in the crisp air, after the fatigues of the hard day, is sound and serene. But the morning! Ah, that is the time that tries men's souls! In this land one would find it very unpleasantly cold to be with her when -"jocund Day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-top." You awake at daylight a little chilly, readjust your blankets, and want to go to sleep. The sun may pour forth from the "golden window of the East" and flood the world with limpid light; the stars may pale and the jet of the midnight sky be diluted to that deep and perfect morning blue into which you gaze to unmeasured depths; the air may become a pervading champagne, dry and delicate, every draught of which tingles the lungs and spurs the blood along the veins with joyous speed; the landscape may woo the eyes with airy undulations of prairie or snow-pointed pinnacles lifted sharply against the azure,—yet sleep chains you. That very quality of the atmosphere which contributes to all this beauty and makes it so delicious to be awake makes it equally blessed to slumber. Lying there in the utterly open air, breathing the pure elixir of the untainted mountains, you come to think even the confinement of a flapping-tent oppressive, and the ventilation of a sheltering sprucebough bad. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF KEATS. 66 (ON COMING INTO POSSESSION OF HIS COPY OF GUZMAN D'ALFARACHE.") cal knowledge of engraving, and an experimental knowledge of certain mechanical processes, which he used mainly for fixing and multiplying his own designs. has been an intelligent curiosity respecting | sider him as an artist armed with a technihim as a painter, stimulated by the glimpses of concealed beauty which the photo-lithographs in that book grudgingly permitted, and not wholly discouraged by the so-called fac-simile reproductions which have been. published at different times. Blake's fame as a painter has rested mainly, however, upon the enthusiastic testimony of a few capable witnesses; his reputation as a designer has had a durable foundation in the copies of the "Book of Job," which have found their way to America; his place as a poet has been more clearly defined by the attention which has been given to his lyrics, and the obscurity in which his visionary books have been suffered to lie. It is not impossible, now, with the added evidence of this interesting collection, to form a fairly clear conception of the limitations of Blake's genius, and to note some of the directions which it takes; of its scope and power no one will wish to pronounce confidently until he has seen all of his work, for genius has a way of surprising the unwary, and new examples of power give new and unexpected pleasure. The circumstances of Blake's life may quickly be recited. He was born in London November 28, 1757, and he died in London August 12, 1827. Excepting four years spent at Felpham by the sea, in Sussex, the seventy years of his life were passed in London. He married Catherine Boucher in his twenty-fifth year, and left her a childless widow. He was a poor man, as the world counts poverty, and at no time during his life did his profuse work bring him more than the plainest living. When ten years old, his artistic tendencies were so strongly intimated, that his father, a modest hosier, did not hesitate to send him to a drawingschool, and afterward to apprentice him to an engraver. He worked from the designs of others until ten years before his death, when he engraved thirty-seven plates for Flaxman's "Hesiod," and he used his graver to the last upon his own inventions. Before he had gained his freedom he had begun original work, and during the twenty years of his maturity, that is, from his thirtieth to his fiftieth year, he was engrossed with the execution of composite works in text, line and color, of which the authorship, design, and mechanical process of reproduction were his own. Even in his early engraving he imported conceptions of his own, so that we may set aside his artisanship as an engraver, reckoning it of little value in any estimate of his distinctive work, and con Of the amount of work done by him it is not easy to make an exact statement. In Gilchrist's "Life," there are annotated lists of Blake's paintings, drawings, and engravings, confessedly imperfect, in which between eight and nine hundred subjects are noted as having been treated by him, some in color, some in black and white, and some with his graver; but, besides these, we must reckon the very important amount of work bestowed on the prophetic books, and a list of more than two hundred engravings from the designs of other artists. Enough can be gathered from this to show that Blake was an industrious man, and, what is more to the purpose, to indicate how very imperfect is the material now from which we may estimate his genius. The author and editors of Gilchrist's “Life” used every effort to get sight of his work, yet they are obliged to confess to not having seen, among other things, a hundred and fourteen designs to Gray's Poems, owned by the Duke of Hamilton, and "reported to be among the very finest works executed by Blake." The published designs of Blake, those, that is, that take their place in the ordinary method of book-illustration, afford a fairly good introduction to a study of his more unusual work. He worked at a time when there were ambitious enterprises by publishers, who were fired with zeal, perhaps, by witnessing the expansive undertaking of Alderman Boydell in his truly British monument to Shakspere's genius. Blake was rather an impracticable man with the publishers, and they found it less easy to make a card of him than of the more pliant and graceful Stothard, yet they followed the advice of Fuseli and others and went to Blake for illustrations, which it was promised by Blake's admirers would sell their books. In one instance only was there anything like substantial success, and this was reached by passing Blake's work through the translating power of another engraver. Blair's Grave, with designs by Blake, engraved by Schiavonetti, must have been very thoroughly published, from the great number of copies which have presented themselves in all quarters since Blake's name has come forward. In America, some bookseller's enterprise found a fresh field, and in many families the book has for years been a well-known show-book. There are few, open to any influence of art, who do not at once confess the attractiveness of these engravings. The style of execution by Schiavonetti is favorable to their popularity: bold, strong, free from quiddling lines, they hold with a firm grasp the conceptions of the artist. The topics treated also are elemental; they are typical passages in human life and death, and require no subtle interpretation. Then the statuesque beauty of design appeals clearly to the eye, the classic forms are presented in a tender warmth, and palpitate with a human. sympathy. One does not need to be a student of Blake, or indeed to know anything of his place in art, to be at once impressed and moved by these inventions. But a familiarity with the artist's mind and mode enables one to penetrate a little further, and to discover, through the mask of Schiavonetti, characteristic features of Blake. The visionary eye, that far-seeing, vivid, and wide-open orb which looks at one from so many of Blake's figures, and most significantly from Blake's own face in both the portraits of him, is here; and here, too, that poetic sense of youth's slender uprightness, and of age's patriarchal hoar wisdom, which again and again stand as ever renewed types in his treatment of human life. The exaggerations of his figure-drawing have doubtless been toned down by the engraver, but in one instance Blake himself may have been to blame, since it is hard to believe that an engraver of Schiavonetti's skill would have chosen deliberately the feebler and less grammatical form; the titlepage of Blair's "Grave" shows an angel with a trump blowing a tremendous blast in the ear of a skeleton; the dead bones are half raised to hear the alarm, but the skeleton rests on the forearm in an entirely impossible manner; the descending angel is hung, unaccountably, in the air-reverse the page and one sees a standing figure; but Blake had elsewhere, in his own engravings of his designs illustrative of Young's "Night Thoughts," given the same conception, only there the descending figure really rushes down with impetuous speed, and the startled skeleton raises itself with a weird and quite possible movement. The illustrations to Young's "Night Thoughts" preceded the work on the "Grave," and were engraved by Blake himself. The result is by no means so satisfactory, partly through Blake's deficiencies as an engraver at this time, partly through what we may call miscalculation of effect. miscalculation of effect. It is not impossible that were the page of Young reduced in size we should not be so disturbed by the inadequacy of the engraved lines; great figures in little more than outline stretch in wide reach over the large page, and wherever there is a defect in drawing or feeling, it is exaggerated by the rather empty style of engraving. Still, there are some passages of great sweetness and majesty, and very often singularly unique adaptations of the design to the thought. One thing, especially, should be noticed,-the persistence with which Blake treated his work in a decorative as separate from a pictorial spirit, aiming to make the page a composition in which the stubborn square of printer's type should compose with his engraved lines; great fertility of resource is shown in this. How perfectly he understood and displayed this spirit of decorative design will appear when we come to speak of other more characteristic work. A completely illustrated edition of the "Night Thoughts" was projected, but only four parts were ever published; these appeared in a luxuriousness of paper and print. In the list of Blake's works, among the undated ones, is a subject which is shown in the Boston collection, and named conjecturally, after the list, "Young burying Narcissa," illustrative of the lines, "With pious sacrilege, a grave I stole ; and muffled deep In midnight darkness, whispered my last sigh." |