On the morning of August 12, ...Blake awoke early and painted for a couple of hours. Then, according to his wife, he said “I have done all I can,” and he dropped the painting to the floor. She sat down at his bedside.
“Kate, stay as you are. You have been an angel to me, I will draw you,” he said. When the drawing was finished, he signed it “Mrs. Blake drawn by Blake” and wrote her name in large letters under his signature.
Then he began to sing. He sang “Hallelujahs & songs of joy and triumph with true exstatic energy,” for the rest of the afternoon––hymns and then, for hours, his own poems. At about six o’clock, he told Catherine that he was going to that country that all his life he had wished to see, and that he would always be about her.
“Then,” wrote his friend George Richmond, who was at his bedside, “his Countenance became fair, His eyes Brighten’d and He burst out singing the things he saw in Heaven,” and he died.
Have pity upon me,
O ye my friends.
For the hand of God hath touched me.
After a minute Richmond reached over and closed his eyes––”to keep the visions in.” Richmond then left. As he paused at the door, he looked back. The last thing he saw, he wrote later, was Catherine kissing William’s hands.
Bryan Doyle
Billy Blake’s Trial