This is a rare example of Blake's choosing an interior with no opening out into the beyond. It is quaint and beautiful, but we are so accustomed to seeing Blake's figures set in the open air with the sky above them, that this closed-in chamber, exquisitely wrought and fantastic as it is, seems a thing foreign to his usual methods, his elective affinity for the great expansive types of God's universe. I think the reason he chose an interior in this instance was that we might be shut in and enclosed within the mind of Job as it revealed itself to his daughters. Instinctively we know that Blake's true lover Rossetti must have cared for this plate with quite special fervour, so close is the analogy between its hidden mysterious richness and the wonderful painted interiors in which he set his women, and from which he developed such a high degree of romantic suggestion and atmosphere. A lute and harp amid trailing vines, grape-laden, form a border to Blake's design, as delicate as the illuminated tracery in a mediaeval Hour-Book. In the final plate--"So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning"--the hole of the great tree that has figured in so many of the designs is surrounded by a crowd of persons, with Job, his wife and beautiful daughters in the midst. All play on instruments of music, while sheep and lambs and (it must be admitted) a most Gothic-looking sheep-dog repose in the immediate foreground. The ancient and fantastic instruments, the rapt upraised faces, the beautiful girls, recall the old Florentine singing galleries--cantorias as they are called--the one by Donatello and the other by Luca della Robbia, now in the Museo del Duomo at Florence. In neither has the joy of praise, the delight in making music, found more complete expression. Blake's "Book of Job" is a holy thing. The full compass of his orchestral nature exerted itself for this final effort. All his long sacrifices, deprivations, passionate sorrows and sacred joys, his burning aspirations and his steadfast faith, found their true meaning, their perfect consecration in the blossoming of this supreme flower on his tree of life. It was Blake's offering to God, like the Sacred Host, reserved and offered up in his own hands on the altar of his storm-weary heart. CHAPTER XI WORK IN THE EXHIBITION OF 1904 In the January of 1904 Messrs. Carfax's tiny galleries at 17, Ryder Street, St. James's, became a shrine to which all pious lovers of William Blake hastened to make their pilgrimage. None of the usual crowd that visit picture shows were to be descried here. Blake's appreciators are not those who are most learned in schools of painting, in tricks of style and niceties of technique. They are mainly composed of those who, having a strong pictorial sense, are yet only effectively moved by _ideas_ in art.