Another plate from the "Europe," the lines of which we reproduce, represents two lithe nude women springing upwards with incomparable grace and the true Blake vigour, among arching wheat stems. They blow horns through which descends a fall of blight upon the corn. The decorative rightness, the exquisite appreciation of the melodies of form, the vitality of action, cannot be too much admired. And the colour! The tender flesh-painting contrasted with the young green of the corn!--Yet Mr. Swinburne, usually so intensely alive to the beautiful, and especially Blake's beautiful, describes the plate in these terms: "Mildews are seen incarnate as foul, flushed women with strenuous limbs contorted, blighting ears of corn with the violent breath of their inflated mouths." There is some delicate tracery of cobwebs, among leaves and greenery, on another page, exhibiting Blake in a marvellously naturalistic mood for once, and a final plate of a man rescuing a woman and child from fierce, rolling flames. No one ever painted fire as Blake did, and over and over again in his treatment of this favourite motive we shall have to own that he is, as Mr. William Michael Rossetti says, in this respect at least, "supreme painter." As I do not know where to place the tiny book or pamphlet entitled, "There is no Natural Religion,"--it having no date affixed to it,--I shall refer to it here. It consists of eleven illustrated leaves, each containing in the engraved text a didactic statement or thesis by Blake on this favourite subject. Below the words, which give much illumination to his peculiar opinions, are small, rough drawings made with a brush full of heavy black, relieved in parts by outlines in sepia. CHAPTER IX THE PROPHETIC BOOKS CONTINUED In studying the next book which Blake produced in 1794--the "Book of Urizen"--it is necessary to disabuse our minds of the idea that Blake's thoughts were not clear to himself. However confused and troubled they appear to us, they were certainly clear as sunlight to him, but he failed in the labour of reducing them to terms of intellectual definiteness, much less to terms of poetic art. The excitement which these visions brought upon his tremulous and sensitive brain seems to have induced a kind of "possession," similar to that of the maenads at the festival of Dionysus of old, so that no very consecutive utterance may be expected from him. Yet there _is_ a kind of sequence in "Urizen," and the marvellous illustrations to the book cannot be properly appreciated without holding the thread of the so-called poem. Setting aside the ancient Biblical tradition, our prophet undertakes no less a task than the writing of a new Genesis, which in its naked horror and despair causes the very gods themselves to hide their faces out of pity to the sons of men. Urizen the creator, the god of restraints and prohibitions, becomes self-inclosed and divides himself from Eternity and the Eternals.