The prelude to the book is set in a tender and lovely key, very difficult, however, to harmonize with what follows. It is not obvious why it occurs here or what connection it has with the dark story of Urizen. The same little picture will be found in the smaller Book of Designs, but there it is quite differently rendered as to colour, and I think more beautifully. Our reproduction is from the latter plate. The cloud-like form of a beautiful woman, drifts across the sky, drawing by the hand a little baby, with the ideal face of sweet infancy. There is a delicious curve in the woman's body, a swirl of the garments, and a quick, fish-like, darting movement about the action of the child which contribute to the impression of flight through a buoyant atmosphere. Turning over the pages of "Urizen" one terror after another takes the breath and quickens the pulse. Urizen--or is it Orc?--his terrible face averted, strides through a world of fire dividing the flames with his arms. [Illustration: LOS HOWLING Colour-printed plate from "Urizen." 1794] A human figure, snake-encircled, falls headlong into raging flames, recalling a somewhat similar idea in "America." Los is next seen, howling in fire, because of his painful separation from Urizen. Poor solitary thinker! what shuddering emotions must have rent Blake as his relentless hand drew and coloured the visionary appearances of these monsters of imagination! To the hot and lurid impression of Plate 6 succeeds one, in which a pallid skeleton, bowed head between knees, sits grisly on the ground. Urizen assumes bones. In much the same attitude, but now turned to the spectator, the next plate shows us an arresting figure. An old man, nude, with white hair, and patriarchal beard sweeping the ground, shows an upturned despairing blind face. Suggestions of indescribable suffering are incarnate in this design. I shall take the liberty of calling the type the "Blake old man." We come across it again and again, and it instances his tendency to concentrate all varieties into a type, to make his artistic language as bare and simple and elemental as possible. The story can be traced through all the plates. Urizen visiting his new world forms a series of six wonderful plates, of which one is very Gothic, representing as it does an amphibious-looking old man very like a gargoyle sinking slowly through a world of water. It is a true grotesque.