The first characteristic of Blake's plastic work, as revealed to the average student, is his mastery of _form_. In the majority of his pictures everything is made subservient to this; backgrounds are selected not so much for their own intrinsic features as to give prominence to the main figure: he is full of the poetry of motion. Let any one study the designs in the _Europe_, where the male and female figures of the Mildew and Blight, blowing the corruption that rushes, as straight as sound, from their long horns on to the festooned ears of barley that droop down the page. The figures seem to fly directly away from the eye, to use a homely metaphor, like a rising partridge--or as the eye watches the last carriage of an express train, is even deceived into substituting for known velocity an imagined contraction of mere dimension. The _Jerusalem_, one of the prophetic books, contains perhaps the most striking of Blake's figure designs. We see the best instance here of what seems to have been a favourite design of Blake's, as it occurs in more than one work--in Blair's "Grave" for instance, with the addition of another figure. It is that of an old man stumbling to a shadowy door in the hill-side, and blown forwards, with his garments sweeping in front of him, as if drawn in by some strong current of air, as he approaches. It is worth noticing how exquisitely Miss Jean Ingelow has used this in her "Song of the Going Away." Here again is the strange mythical figure, half-swan, half-woman, floating on the stream; or the gigantic Cyclopean gate of piled stones, with the wistful crowd about it, and the crescent moon seen through the huge orifice; or that mysterious design of the little bewildered figure, with arms outspread in agony and despair, stumbling between the huge firmly set feet of a gigantic being, to whose ankle-bone he hardly reaches. Yet with all this subservience of accessories to form, Blake's anatomy is far from perfect. He had a trick of attenuating and elongating the thigh, as in one of the cases we mentioned above, where the young figure in the rising light kneels on the top of the mound into which the old bent man is being urged; or in the three melancholy beings represented on p. 51 of the _Jerusalem_--Vala, Hyle, and Skofeld, the anatomy of the second figure being of the stiffest kind--the attitude aimed at being that of prostration or abandonment, the head between the knees, as in the story of Elijah. Neither is it universally true that he spends no pains on backgrounds or distances. Occasionally there is some salient and distant point flashed in with a delicacy that reminds you of Albert Dürer, as in one of the coarsely engraved woodcuts, done in 1820 to illustrate Philips's pastorals, where in a background between two heavily outlined hills appears a distant town on the hillside, with spires and roofs lying in its own circle of sunlight, divinely delicate and airy.