One wishes (profanely no doubt) that our artist had seen fit to make the tiger that illustrates the British Museum copy, yellow and black, rather than blue and bistre and red, which colours seem to have no natural relation to the animal. Is it possible that this page was coloured by Mrs. Blake's hand in these weird parti-hues? The "Songs of Experience" are pitted like a dark contrast against the sun-kissed radiance of the "Songs of Innocence." One state of mind opposes itself aggressively against the contrary state of mind. One set of impressions is recorded in opposition to the impressions of sometimes the same things, sometimes their correlatives taken from a widely divergent stand-point. Thus the Lamb in the "Songs of Innocence" finds its contrast in the Tiger of the "Songs of Experience." Infant Joy is set against Infant Sorrow, the ordered beauty and sweetness of one Holy Thursday is the reverse of the despairing cry of pain uttered in the other Holy Thursday. The Divine Image emits its celestial radiance against the cynical brilliance of the Human Abstract, and that other distorted Divine Image. It is interesting to know that Blake issued the "Songs of Innocence and Experience" at the modest price of from thirty shillings to two guineas at first. Later in life he received four guineas for each copy, and during his last years Sir Thomas Lawrence insisted on paying twelve guineas and Sir Francis Chantrey twenty for copies. At Messrs. Sotheby's sale of the Crewe Collection of Blake's works on March 31st of last year (1903) the price reached for a very perfect copy containing the four title-pages, was L300. The sum would have been wealth to Blake, but it is the world's way, consecrated now by immemorial tradition, to lay its laurels of reward and appreciation only at the _dead_ feet of its great men. [Illustration: PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM "SONGS OF INNOCENCE," 1789] CHAPTER VIII THE PROPHETIC BOOKS "The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them, and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, and so be the cause of imposition?