True, the drawings are not reproduced in Cromek's edition of the poem as they left Blake's hand. The story of Cromek's mean transaction has already been retold in these pages. Schiavonetti's plates, beautiful and fluent in execution as they are, have lost that peculiar rugged character, that almost galvanic energy which stamp the original drawings with Blake's hallmark. It must be borne in mind that engraving may alter original drawings much in the same way as does the transposition of a musical phrase from the original into a foreign key. The melody is the same, but the mood of it is different. It becomes dull instead of bright, or plaintive instead of triumphant. Schiavonetti's transposing of Blake has made the designs more sweet and less strong, or perhaps less vehement. It is Blake in a new aspect, one so obviously beautiful that all the world admits its loveliness. It is Blake arranged for the many, not Blake for the intimate few! [Illustration: DEATH OF THE STRONG, WICKED MAN, FROM BLAIR'S "GRAVE" Engraving by L. Schiavonetti after design by Blake. Published 1808] The stanzas he wrote in dedication to Queen Charlotte form such a fitting introduction to the plates that we quote them: The door of death is made of gold That mortal eyes cannot behold, But when the mortal eyes are closed And cold and pale the limbs reposed, The soul awakes and wond'ring sees In her mild hands the golden keys. The grave is heaven's golden gate, And rich and poor around it wait. O Shepherdess of England's fold, Behold this gate of pearl and gold. To dedicate to England's Queen The visions that my soul has seen, And, by her kind permission bring, What I have borne on solemn wing, From the vast regions of the grave; Before her throne my wings I wave, Bowing before my sov'reign's feet. The grave produced these blossoms sweet, In mild repose from earthly strife; The blossoms of eternal life. And now Blake comes to close quarters with the subject that had haunted him all his life, the dark web on which he had woven so many bright, half-defined fancies. Again we discern a _point d'appui_ between him and Michael Angelo. The thoughts of neither of them were long away from death. Michael Angelo wrestled with the dark angel and brought away from the encounter the profound and intimate thoughts that he has enshrined in the Medici Tombs of San Lorenzo. Never has the human soul--save perhaps Beethoven's--apprehended more closely the mystery, the terror, the mingled shrinking and awe of the grave, yet at the same time its hope, than he did in the Sacristy of the Medici Chapel. And in all plastic art, the only things to which these fateful sculptures may be likened in their qualities of rapt and sincere thinking, united to imagination and insight, are the designs, which Blake made to illustrate Blair's "Grave."