In what strange dreams did Blake see the pale woman of Plate 13 lying on the bed of ocean. Quick moving fishes flash around her body in the dim blue twilight, and a sea snake is coiled about her legs. On the top of the same page the body floating on waves is being torn by a vulture. Many of the plates are quivering with flames which shoot up in spiral tongues to play about the letters of the writing. Incidentally, the writing used in "America" is more fluent--running into dainty pennons and fluttering streamers of decoration--than any used before. At the sale of Messrs. Hodgson's before mentioned, a single loose coloured plate of the frontispiece to "America" (Orc chained by the wrists) sold for L20 10_s._ We close "America" regretfully, for a wild enchantment emanates from its pages, and entering into the spectator's mind makes him realize that indeed "everything possible to be believed is an image of truth." [Illustration: PAGE FROM "AMERICA: A PROPHECY," 1793 Printed in blue, from the Print Room copy] In 1794 appeared "Europe, a prophecy." It has fifteen large plates, but before dwelling on them a word must be said about the prophecy itself. The prelude is the lament of a nameless shadowy female, who rises from out the breast of Orc. She is also daughter to Enitharmon. Her complaint is often musical enough if we could but know what it was all about: I wrap my turban of thick clouds around my lab'ring head, And fold the sheety waters as a mantle round my limbs, Yet the red sun and moon, And all the overflowing stars, rain down prolific pains. Blake would seem to have got fairly drunk with the excitement of wild words and musical phrases. There is little or no sequence of ideas, and the prophecy which follows the prelude comes storming forth, full of sonorous sound, but "without form and void." All that can be made out from the din of frenetic words is that Enitharmon calls upon her son Orc, "the horrent demon," to arise and bring with him his brothers and sisters. But in the middle of her speech she falls into a primaeval doze of some eighteen hundred years. Patient and painstaking as the reader may be, an incident of this kind taxes his temper somewhat too severely, more especially as it seems a gratuitously irritating freak on Blake's part, without any apparent sense or reason to justify it. Persevering, we find that while she is asleep all kinds of dire affliction come upon the race of man, and the wild pelter of words and ideas hither and thither continues to increase in fury. It is like the dancing of the Dervishes--faster and faster, furious and more furious, higher and higher, so quick at last that the eye cannot follow the movements,--and then comes the breaking out of the wild demoniac cries, and the convulsive excitement, which is finally satisfied with nothing but the letting of blood.