“The Island in the Moon” furnishes grotesque instances, such as that of old Corruption dressed in yellow vest. In “The Divine Image,” from the “Songs of Innocence,” while commonplace virtues are personified, the simple direct manner of the process distinguishes them from their prototypes in the earlier moral and didactic poetry of the century: For Mercy has a human heart Pity a human face And Love, the human form divine And Peace the human dress.[233] An instance of personification raised to a higher power is found in Blake’s letter to Butts[234] beginning With Happiness stretch’d across the hills, In a cloud that dewy sweetness distils, whilst elsewhere personified abstractions appear with new epithets, the most striking example being in “Earth’s Answer,” from the “Songs of Experience”: Prison’d on watry shore _Starry_ Jealousy does keep my den. Moreover, Blake’s figures are often presented in an imaginative guise that helps to emphasize the gulf fixed between him and the majority of his contemporaries and predecessors. Thus “Joy” is twice depicted as a bird: Joys upon our branches sit Chirping loud and singing sweet (“Song”—“Poetical Sketches”) and Welcome, stranger, to this place Where Joy doth sit on every bough. (“Song by a Shepherd”) In Blake’s youthful work the personifications of natural powers, though in most cases clearly imitative are yet striking in their beauty and power of suggestion. The influence of “Ossian” is seen in such “prose” personifications as “The Veiled Evening walked solitary down the Western hills and Silence reposed in the valley” (“The Couch of Death”), and “Who is this that with unerring step dares to tempt the wild where only Nature’s foot has trod, ’Tis Contemplation, daughter of the Grey Morning” (“Contemplation”). Here also are evocations of the seasons which, whatever they may owe to Thomson or Collins, are new in that we actually get a picture of Spring with “dewy locks” as she looks down Thro’ the clear windows of the morning of summer with ruddy limbs and flourishing hair, of the “jolly autumn,” laden with fruits and stained With the blood of the grape; and of winter, a dreadful monster whose skin clings To her strong bones.