different drivers. We set out between six and seven in the morning of Thursday, with sixteen heavy boxes and portfolios full of prints.
And now begins a new life, because another covering of earth is shaken off. I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my brain are studies and chambers filled with books and pictures of old, which I wrote and painted in ages of eternity before my mortal life; and those works ^are the delight and study of archangels. Why, then, should I be anxious about the riches or fame of mortality? The Lord our Father will do for us and with us according to His divine will for our good.
You, O dear Flaxman! are a sublime archangel,—my friend and companion from eternity. In the Divine bosom in our dwelling place, I look back into the regions of reminiscence, and behold our ancient days before this earth appeared in its vegetated[1] mortality to my mortal vegetated eyes. I see our houses of eternity, which can never be separated, though our mortal vehicles should stand at the remotest corners of heaven from each other.
Farewell, my best friend! Remember me and my wife in love and friendship to our dear Mrs.
- ↑ For Blake's use of the word, cp. Jerusalem, p. 77: "Imagination, the real and eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more."
