We have a sense of incongruity in seeing this defiant, but sincere pencil employed by publishers to illustrate the turgid sorrow of Young's "Night Thoughts." The work was to have been issued in parts, but got no farther than the first. (It would have been no great calamity, if the poem itself had come to the same premature end!) The sonorous mourner could hardly have recognized himself in the impersonations in which he was presented, nor his progeny in the concrete objects to which they were reduced. The well-known couplet, "'Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours And ask them what report they've borne to heaven," is represented by hours "drawn as aerial and shadowy beings," some of whom are bringing their scrolls to the inquirer, and others are carrying their records to heaven. "Oft burst my song beyond the bounds of life" has a lovely figure, holding a lyre, and springing into the air, but confined by a chain to the earth. Death puts off his skeleton, and appears as a solemn, draped figure; but in many cases the clerical poet is "taken at his word," with a literalness more startling than dignified. Introduced by Flaxman to Hayley, friend and biographer of Cowper, favorably known to his contemporaries, though now wellnigh forgotten, Blake was invited to Felpham, and began there a new life. It is pleasant to look back upon this period. Hayley, the kindly, generous, vain, imprudent, impulsive country squire, not at all excepting himself in his love for mankind, pouring forth sonnets on the slightest provocation,--indeed, so given over to the vice of verse, that "he scarce could ope His mouth but out there flew a trope,"-- floating with the utmost self-complacence down the smooth current of his time; and Blake, sensitive, unique, protestant, impracticable, aggressive: it was a rare freak of Fate that brought about such companionship; yet so true courtesy was there that for four years they lived and wrought harmoniously together,--Hayley pouring out his harmless wish-wash, and Blake touching it with his fiery gleam. Their joint efforts were hardly more pecuniarily productive than Blake's single-handed struggles; but his life there had other and better fruits. In the little cottage overlooking the sea, fanned by the pure breeze, and smiled upon by sunshine of the hills, he tasted rare spiritual joy. Throwing off mortal incumbrance,--never, indeed, an overweight to him,--he revelled in his clairvoyance. The lights that shimmered across the sea shone from other worlds. The purple of the gathering darkness was the curtain of God's tabernacle. Gray shadows of the gloaming assumed mortal shapes, and he talked with Moses and the prophets, and the old heroes of song. The Ladder of Heaven was firmly fixed by his garden-gate, and the angels ascended and descended. A letter written to Flaxman, soon after his arrival at Felpham, is so characteristic that we cannot refrain from transcribing it:--