The plate entitled "The Soul hovering over the Body reluctantly parting with Life" satisfies with a strange and unearthly delight. No Diana ever hung more yearningly above her Endymion than this beautiful and tender soul lingers, in loving reluctance to part, above the stiff human tenement she has just quitted. Presently she will take her darting flight through the window and over the mountains and up into the illimitable glory of the distant sunrise. There is the hush and the blessedness of a great silence on this dim silver dawn, suggesting the spiritual correspondence between it and the dawning life of the newly-released soul. Was it a recollection of that younger brother, Robert, so dearly loved, that taught Blake the pathetic dignity of the composed limbs, the sculptured calm of the dead face? The "Death of the Strong Wicked Man" is a savage contrast to the peace, the musical pause, of the last-mentioned design. In "Milton," Blake writes: Judge then of thyself; thy Eternal Lineaments explore, What is eternal and what changeable, and what annihilable. And he answers the question in the forms given to these passing souls, some being closely analogous to their mortal appearances, others changing even to sex, while others again have passed from age into a state of perpetual youth. This latter is the case in the plate called "Death's Door." "Age on crutches is hurried by a tempest into the open door of the Grave, while above sits a young man--'the renovated man in light and glory'--his beautiful young head thrown up to the sky, his mouth full of inspired song, his whole virile body expressing ideal beauty, rapture, glad new life." No one but Michael Angelo could have drawn with strong felicitous hand the glorious youth atop of the grave as Blake has done. The whole allegory is so intellectually definite, so succinctly expressed that thought and its body form are here identical. But the strangest flower of his thoughts on the grave, blossoms in the picture called "The Re-Union of the Soul and the Body." Descending like a bolt from the blue, cleaving the smoke ascending from the fires of consuming materialism, the soul embraces with passionate joy the strong male body, which struggles from the grave to enfold her. Cleansing and fusing fires flame around them. The beauty of the drawing--the melodious curves of the downward plunging "soul," the delicious foreshortening of the leg, the swirl of the white drapery--has stricken into poetic lines the forcefulness of flight, the passion of re-union. This emotional conception moves the heart strangely. It is the promise of St. Paul here visibly consummated, that a spiritual body shall at last clothe the shivering unhoused soul. [Illustration: THE SOUL RELUCTANTLY PARTING FROM THE BODY, FROM BLAIR'S "GRAVE" Engraving by L. Schiavonetti after design made by Blake. Published 1808] "States change," Blake wrote, "but Individual Identities never change nor cease."