a long and moonless night

“’Tis but a night, a long and moonless night
We make the grave our bed, and then are gone!”

—William Blake, from The Grave, a Poem, illustrated by Twelve Etchings.

France is sick

“‘France is sick—the very sky
Though sunshine light, it seems to me as pale
As is the fainting man on his death-bed,
Whose face is shown by light of one weak taper—
It makes me sad and sick unto the heart;
Thousands must fall to-day.’”

—William Blake, from King Edward the Third. Spoken by Sir Thomas Dagworth on the eve of the battle of Cressy.

The Chimney Sweeper

“As Tommy was sleeping, he had such a sight;
There thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black;

And by came an Angel, who had a bright key,
He opened the coffins and set them all free;
Then down a green vale, leaping, laughing they run,
And wash in a river, and shine like the sun.

Then, naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise up on pure clouds and sport in the wind:
And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father and never want joy.”

—William Blake, from The Chimney Sweeper.

happy, silent, moony beams

“Sweet dreams form a shade
O’er my lovely infant’s head;
Sweat dreams of pleasant streams
By happy, silent, moony beams.”

—William Blake, the opening of A Cradle Song.

the brilliant Wings of the Spirits of the Prism

“He [William Blake] can be excelled by none where he is successful. Like his thoughts his paintings seem to be inspired by fairies & his colours look as if they were the bloom dropped from the brilliant Wings of the Spirits of the Prism.”

—Frederick Tatham, from Life of Blake, composed about 1832 and first published in 1906.

the hapless soldiers sigh

“How the chimney sweepers cry,
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down palace Walls;”

—William Blake, from London.

purple tide

“The Rhine was red with human blood,
The Danube rolled in purple tide,
O’er the Euphrates Satan stood,
And over Asia stretched his pride”

—William Blake, from Jerusalem.

a bright piece of yellow chalk

“In a corner Mona and Paddy were sitting, huddled togehter, a few torn school primers before them. They were writing down little sums onto an old chipped slate, using a bright piece of yellow chalk. I was close to them, propped up by a few pillows against the wall, watching.

It was the chalk that attracted me so much. It was a long, slender stick of vivid yellow. I had never seen anything like it before, and it showed up so well against the black surface of the slate that I was fascinated by it as much as if it had been a stick of gold.

Suddenly, I wanted desperately to do what my sister was doing. Then—without thinking or knowing exactly what I was doing, I reached out and took the stick of chalk out of my sister’s hand—with my left foot.”

—Christy Brown, from My Left Foot, his autobiography, 1954.

the starting point

“Dostoevski once wrote ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted’; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point.”

—Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, 1948.

what we call “seeing the sun”

“Modern physics and physiology throw a new light upon the ancient problem of perception. If there is to be anything that can be called “perception,” it must be in some degree an effect of the object perceived, and it must more or less resemble the object if it is to be a source of knowledge of the object. . . . Light-waves travel from the sun to the earth, and in doing so obey their own laws. . . . When they reach our atmosphere, they suffer refraction, and some are more scattered than others. When they reach a human eye, all sorts of things happen which would not happen elsewhere, ending up with what we call “seeing the sun.” But although the sun of our visual experience is very different from the sun of the astronomer, it is still a source of knowledge as to the latter, because “seeing the sun” differs from “seeing the moon” in ways that are causally connected with the difference between the astronomer’s sun and the astronomer’s moon.”

—Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 1945. From the chapter entitled The Philosophy of Logical Analysis.