dreams from many generations of struggling humanity-an Eden such as childhood sees, is brought nearer than ever poet brought it before. For this poet was in assured possession of the Golden Age, within the chambers of his own mind. As we read, fugitive glimpses open, clear as brief, of our buried childhood, of an unseen world present, past, to come; we are endowed with new spiritual sight, with unwonted intuitions, bright visitants from finer realms of thought, which ever elude us, ever hover near. We encounter familiar objects, in unfamiliar, transfigured aspects, simple expression and deep meanings, type and antitype. True, there are palpable irregularities, metrical licence, lapse of grammar, and even of orthography; but often the sweetest melody, most daring eloquence of rhythm, and, what is more, appropriate rhythm. They are unfinished poems: yet would finish have bettered their bold and careless freedom? Would it not have brushed away the delicate bloom? that visible spontaneity, so rare and great a charm, the eloquent attribute of our old English Ballads and of the early Songs of all nations. The most deceptively perfect wax-model is no substitute for the living flower. The form is, in these Songs, a transparent medium of the spiritual thought, not an opaque body. 'He has dared to venture,' writes Malkin, not irrelevantly, 'on the ancient simplicity, and feeling it in his own character 'and manners, has succeeded better than those who have only seen it 'through a glass.'

There is the same divine afflatus as in the Poetical Sketches, but fuller a maturity of expression, despite surviving negligences, and of thought and motive. The 'Child Angel,' as we ventured to call the Poet in earlier years, no longer merely sportive and innocently wanton, wears a brow of thought; a glance of insight has passed into

'A sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused'

in Nature, a feeling of the burthen of the mystery of things;

though still possessed by widest sympathies with all that is simple and innocent, with echoing laughter, little lamb, a flower's blossom, with 'emmet wildered and forlorn.'

These poems have a unity and mutual relationship, the influence of which is much impaired if they be read otherwise than as a whole. They are given entire in the Second Part of this Volume, to which I refer my reader, if not of decisively unpoetic turn.

Who but Blake, with his pure heart, his simple exalted character, could have transfigured a commonplace meeting of Charity Children at St. Paul's, as he has done in the Holy Thursday? a picture at once tender and grand. The bold images, by a wise instinct resorted to at the close of the first and second stanzas and opening of the third, are in the highest degree imaginative; they are true as only Poetry can be.

How vocal is the poem Spring, despite imperfect rhymes. From addressing the child, the poet, by a transition not infrequent with him, passes out of himself into the child's person, showing a chameleon sympathy with childlike feelings. Can we not see the little three-year-old prattler stroking the white lamb, her feelings made articulate for her?-Even more remarkable is the poem entitled The Lamb, sweet hymn of tender infantine sentiment appropriate to that perennial image of meekness; to which the fierce eloquence of The Tiger, in the Songs of Experience, is an antitype. In The Lamb, the poet again changes person to that of a child. Of lyrical beauty, take as a sample The Laughing Song, with its happy ring of merry innocent voices. This and The Nurse's Song are more in the style of his early poems, but, as we said, of far maturer execution. I scarcely need call attention to the delicate simplicity of the little pastoral, entitled The Shepherd: to the picturesqueness in a warmer hue, the delightful domesticity, the expressive melody of The Echoing Green: or to the lovely sympathy and piety which irradiate the touching Cradle Song.

More enchanting still is the stir of fancy and sympathy which animates The Dream, that

'Did weave a shade o'er my angel guarded bed ;'

of an emmet that had

Lost her way,

Where on grass methought I lay.

Few are the readers, I should think, who can fail to appreciate the symbolic grandeur of The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found, or the enigmatic tenderness of the Blossom and the Divine Image; and the verses On Another's Sorrow, express some of Blake's favourite religious ideas, his abiding notions on the subject of the Godhead, which surely suggest the kernel of Christian feeling. A similar tinge of the divine, colours the lines called Night, with its revelation of angelic guardians, believed in with unquestioning piety by Blake, who makes us in our turn conscious, as we read, of angelic noiseless. footsteps. For a nobler depth of religious beauty, with accordant grandeur of sentiment and language, I know no parallel nor hint elsewhere of such a poem as The Little Black Boy

My mother bore me in the southern wild.

We may read these poems again and again, and they continue fresh as at first. There is something unsating in them, a perfume as of a growing violet, which renews itself as fast as it is inhaled.

One poem, The Chimney Sweeper, still calls for special notice. This and Holy Thursday are remarkable as an anticipation of the daring choice of homely subject, of the yet more daringly familiar manner, nay, of the very metre and trick of style adopted by Wordsworth in a portion of those memorable experiments in Poetry,'— the Lyrical Ballads:-in The Reverie of Poor Susan, for instance (not written till 1797), the Star Gazers, and The Power of Music (both 1806). The little Sweep's dream has the spiritual touch

peculiar to Blake's hand. This poem, I may add, was extracted thirty-five years later in a curious little volume (1824), of James. Montgomery's editing, as friend of the then unprotected ClimbingBoys. It was entitled The Chimney Sweeper's Friend, and ClimbingBoy's Album: a miscellany of verse and prose, original and borrowed, with illustrations by Robert Cruickshank. Charles Lamb, one of the living authors applied to by the kind-hearted Sheffield poet, while declining the task of rhyming on such a subject, sent a copy of this poem from the Songs of Innocence, communicating it as 'from a very rare and curious little work." At line five, 'Little Tom Dacre' is transformed by a sly blunder of Lamb's into 'little Tom Toddy.' The poem on the same subject in the Songs of Experience, inferior poetically, but in an accordant key of gloom, would have been the more apposite to Montgomery's volume.

The tender loveliness of these poems will hardly reappear in Blake's subsequent writing. Darker phases of feeling, more sombre colours, profounder meanings, ruder eloquence, characterise the Songs of Experience of five years later.

In 1789, the year in which Blake's hand engraved the Songs of Innocence, Wordsworth was finishing his versified Evening Walk on the Goldsmith model; Crabbe ('Pope in worsted stockings,' as Hazlitt christened him), famous six years before by his Village, was publishing one of his minor quartos, The Newspaper; and Mrs. Charlotte Smith, not undeservedly popular, was accorded a fifth edition within five years, of her Elegiac Sonnets, one or two of which still merit the praise of being good sonnets, among the best in a bad time. In these years, Hayley, Mason, Hannah More, Jago, Downman, Helen Maria Williams, were among the active producers of poetry; Cumberland, Holcroft, Inchbald, Burgoyne, of the acting drama of the day; Peter Pindar, and Pasquin Williams, of the satire.

The designs, simultaneous offspring with the poems, which in

the most literal sense illuminate the Songs of Innocence, consist of poetized domestic scenes. The drawing and draperies are grand in style as graceful, though covering few inches' space; the colour pure, delicate, yet in effect rich and full. The mere tinting of the text and of the free ornamental border often makes a refined picture. The costumes of the period are idealized, the landscape given in pastoral and symbolic hints. Sometimes these drawings almost suffer from being looked at as a book and held close, instead of at due distance as pictures, where they become more effective. In composition, colour, pervading feeling, they are lyrical to the eye, as the Songs to the ear.

On the whole, the designs to the Songs of Innocence are finer as well as more pertinent to the poems; more closely interwoven with them, than those which accompany the Songs of Experience. Of these in their place.