Litchfield Enquirer

[From an English paper.]

Blake, the Artist's Wife. When he was six-and-twenty years old, he married Katharine Boutcher, a young woman of humble connexions—the dark-eyed Kate of several of his lyric poems. She lived near his father's house, and was noticed by Blake for the whiteness of her hand, "the brightness of her eyes, and a slim and handsome shape, corresponding with his own notion of sylphs and naiads. As he was an original in all things, it would have been out of character to fall in love like an ordinary mortal. He was describing one evening in company the pains he had suffered from some capricious lady or another, when Katharine Boutcher said, "I pity you from my heart." "Do you pity me," said Blake, "then I love you for that." "And I love you," said the frank hearted lass, and so the courtship began. He tried how well she looked in a drawing; and then how her charms became verse, and finding, moreover, that she had good domestic qualities, he married her.

They lived together long and happily. She seems to have been created on purpose for Blake. She believed him to be the finest genius on earth: she believed in his verse—she believed in his designs: and to the wildest flights of his imagination she bowed the knee, and was a worshipper. She set his house in good order, prepared his frugal meal, learning to think as he thought, and, indulging him in his harmless absurdities, became, as it were, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. She learned—what a young and handsome woman is seldom apt to learn—to despise gaudy dresses, costly meals, pleasant company, and agreeable invitations—she found out the way of being happy at home, living on the simplest of food, and contented with the homeliest of clothing. It was no ordinary mind that could do all this: and she whom Blake emphatically called his "best friend," wrought in the press the impressions from his plates; she coloured them with a light hand; made drawings much in the spirit of her husband's compositions, and almost rivalled him in all things, save in the power which he possessed of seeing visions of any individual living or dead, whenever he chose to see them.