Blake was little known in his time outside the book trade, where he engraved designs on copper plate to illustrate books by Milton, Gray, and others, but today he has gained almost cult status because of his own poetry and designs, which both reveal prophetic visions and express gentle sympathy for the world’s sufferers. Perhaps because he lived in London all but three years of his life, he wrote very little about the natural world—indeed “Nature” for him implied the constriction of the human spirit imposed by science and rationalism—but we have included a lovely passage about the coming of spring, an episode from his brief epic Milton, where the poet Milton’s female “emanation,” named Ololon, descends from heaven to help him in the redemption of Albion (Britain).