Young's "Night Thoughts," which we take up next, bears the date 1797. Blake made no less than five hundred and thirty-seven water-colour drawings for this poem, but only forty-three designs were eventually selected for publication, and these were reproduced as uncoloured engravings. Till a short while ago, Mr. Bain of the Haymarket possessed the whole series of water-colour drawings, but they have now passed by purchase into the hands of an American collector. Through the kindness of Mr. Frederic Shields, who many years ago made tracings and copies from the unpublished designs, I am enabled to give reproductions of some of the most striking, though of course not in colour. (It will be remembered that Mr. Shields wrote the very powerful chapter on Young's "Night Thoughts" which is included in the second volume of Gilchrist's Life.) The designs published with the poem are larger than those we are accustomed to see in Blake's books, and the disposition of them on the pages, of which the middle is occupied by the printed type enclosed in rectangular spaces, is not effective. We miss our artist's beautiful fluent writing, and the type produces a bald staring impression on the beholder. When, too, the head and shoulders of a figure appear above the placard and the feet and legs below, as in one or two plates, we are irresistibly reminded of sandwich men. The want of colour also is a crying need in these large, pale, somewhat flat plates. The engravings are executed with great lightness, though with a certain monotony of line. They are slightly shaded, and have a distinguishing quality of purity and breadth. What luminous conceptions and stimulating fancies they contain! though it must also be admitted that there are a few plates which seem unworthy of Blake, being diffuse, tame, uninspired. Plate 16 represents the "Aspiration of the Soul for Immortality" in a beautiful symbolic female figure holding a lyre and fluttering upward, but confined to the earth by chains around the ankles. Plates 25 and 26 are, perhaps, the most tremendous in the book. In one Time creeps towards the spectator, while in the other he half-leaps, half-flies in his headlong course away. [Illustration: TIME SPEEDING AWAY Engraved plate from Young's "Night Thoughts," published in 1797] As one turns the pages one is fain to exclaim of the artist that he breathed the fine thin air of the mountain tops, that indeed he lived "in the high places of thought."