The great Florentine, it is true, wrought colossally in enduring marble before all the world, while the obscure Blake, two centuries later, traced out his thoughts on paper, his designs being known to comparatively few persons; but the conceptions of the two brains are allied, and the works of the two hands are own brothers. Blair's conventional and smooth verses in Blake's case have nothing to do with the matter. They merely form the pegs on which he cast the great garment of his thoughts. Death--the Grave!--his intense and fervent spirit so brooded on the subject that the result is no mere illustration of Blair's text, but invention. The poem in his handling has enlarged itself out of all knowledge, and turned to us an unfamiliar face, new and enriching conceptions. Blair merely indicated the track on which his pioneer spirit journeyed heedfully and musingly, through the dim country of Death. Piercing all conventions, all accepted theology, he would fain seize the very heart of the elusive mystery. "What _is_ Death?" he asks; "let me peer into the grave unshrinkingly and see for myself." And from the grave he brings this triumphant answer, "Death is Life, this Life only is Death; you have but to die to conquer Death"; or in Walt Whitman's prosaic but arresting phrase, "To die is different from what anyone supposes, and luckier." We reproduce the most significant of the plates. In "The Soul exploring the Recesses of the Grave," we see a shuddering yet resolved man determinately bringing himself to the close contemplation of death. He remains above the vault on the hillside trying to pierce the moonlit earth with his limited human vision; but his imagination, his soul, penetrates where he cannot enter--yet! In the likeness of a fair woman with a lamp, like the Greek Psyche, she tiptoes delicately into the arched hollow beneath the hill, and gazes alarmed but steadfast on a dead body wrapped in flickering flames. It is to be noted that the man whose soul regards death so closely is already on the mountain tops, he has "lifted up his eyes unto the hills," and his figure set against the sky has an indefinable air of separateness from ordinary humanity.