They landed in firm array upon the rocks

Of Albion; they kissed the rocky shore :
"Be thou our mother and our nurse," they said,
"Our children's mother; and thou shalt be our grave,
The sepulchre of ancient Troy, from whence

Shall rise cities, and thrones, and awful powers."

Our fathers swarm from the ships. Giant voices
Are heard from out the hills; the enormous sons
Of Ocean run from rocks and caves; wild men,
Naked, and roaring like lions, hurling rocks,
And wielding knotty clubs, like oaks entangled,
Thick as a forest ready for the axe.

*

Our fathers move in firm array to battle;
The savage monsters rush like roaring fire,
Like as a forest roars with crackling flames
When the red lightning borne by furious storm

Lights on some woody shore, and the parched heavens
Rain fire into the molten raging sea.

*

*

*

*

*

Our fathers, sweating, lean on their spears and view
The mighty dead: giant bodies streaming blood,
Dread visages frowning in silent death.

Then Brutus speaks, inspired; our fathers sit
Attentive on the melancholy shore.

Hear ye the voice of Brutus : "The flowing waves

Of Time come rolling o'er my breast," he said,

"And my heart labours with futurity.

Our sons shall rule the empire of the sea,

Their mighty wings shall stretch from East to West;
Their nest is in the sea, but they shall roam

"Our sons shall rise from thrones in joy, each one
Buckling his armour on; Morning shall be

* Prevented by the gleaming of their swords,

And Evening hear their songs of victory.

"Freedom shall stand upon the cliffs of Albion,

*

* Prevented, I need hardly say, is used here in the old sense of anticipated.

Casting her blue eyes over the green ocean;
Or, towering, stand upon the roaring waves,
Stretching her mighty spear o'er distant lands,
While with her eagle wings she covereth
Fair Albion's shore and all her families."

This is the song of the Minstrel as given in the Selections. I have the highest esteem for the taste and judgment of Mr. Dante G. Rossetti, and the whole reading public owes him no common debt of gratitude for his work in the second volume as well as for the Supplementary Chapter in the first. It is probable, it is almost certain, that he has published quite as much of Blake's poetry and prose as it was prudent to publish experimentally after the neglect of eighty years. But if the above interlineal points mark omissions, the omitted passages should be re-instated in the next edition; the whole of this Song, as it stands in Blake's earliest volume or in manuscript, should be given at any rate in an Appendix if not in the body of the work. For this Chant belongs to the whole British people; it is one of the most precious among the most precious heirlooms bequeathed to us by our forefathers; it is a national jewel of such magnificence that no one man, however honest and skilful, can be trusted to cut it and set it in accordance with his private opinion.

We English are surely a strange people. Pictures beyond price are bequeathed to us, and our first step towards disposing of them satisfactorily is to bury them away where they cannot be seen. A Song is chanted for us which should thrill and swell every native heart with patriotic pride, a Song great with the grandeur of our national life and history for three millenniums of legends and annals and journals, a Song heroic as Cressy,

sublime as Trafalgar; and for fourscore years we leave it to that oblivion of oblivions which has never had any remembrance. The poet lives forty years after giving this glorious Song to his people, devotedly loyal to his highest inspirations, pure, poor, obscure; and when he dies, it is here and there casually remarked that a clever madman has at length reached the sanity of the grave. Again forty years come and go ere a few admirers worthy of him they admire can venture with much diffidence (surely but too well-founded!) to bespeak the favour of his people for this Song, in which he has added a great and burning light to their illustrations the most splendid, and for other songs in which he has given them the seed whose harvest is likely to be the wealth and spiritual subsistence of generations yet unborn.

When Blake wrote this, however young in years, he was undoubtedly mature; as Keats when he wrote Hyperion, as Shelley when he wrote Adonais or The Triumph of Life. We shall all soon know it by heart, and cherish it in our hearts, with the speeches of Henry at Agincourt and the Scots wha hae of Burns, with Campbell's Mariners of England and Robert Browning's Home Thoughts from the Sea; and then we shall feel and know that for us, it is perfect beyond criticism, except the criticism of reverent interpretation. It is Titanic, and it cleaves to its Mother Earth like a Titan, like a mountain, like a broad oak-tree; and the grandeur of its strength is the grandeur of a gnarled oak whose vigorous life bursts through all conventional symmetries, the grandeur of a mountain which the central fires have heaved into lines enormous and savagely irregular.

Many years afterwards, in 1789, when Blake was thirty-two, the Songs of Innocence appeared; and we

learn from them the strange fact that he who was mature in his childhood and youth became in his manhood a little child. A little child, pure in soul as the serenest light of the morning, happy and innocent as a lamb leaping in the meadows, singing all its joy in the sweetest voice with that exquisite infantine lisp which thrills the adult heart with yearning tenderness.* The

*“Let the reader try to breathe like a child, and let the auditors of the breath decide whether he succeeds or no. There is indeed in adult breath such a peopling of multitudinous thoughts, such a tramp of hardness and troubles, as does not cede to the attempt to act the infantine even for a moment." (Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson : The Human Body and its Connexion with Man, p. 98, note.) What is true of common breathing, is true more conspicuously of breathing idealised and harmonised, of the breathing of song in which psychical have superseded the physical rhythms. The adult cannot sing like a child; but Blake in these Songs does so he did not act the infantine, for he was infantine, by a regeneration as real while as mysterious as ever purest saint experienced in the religious life. And this regeneration, so far as we can learn, was effected without the throes of agony and doubt and despair which the saints all pass through in being born again.

I am merely writing a few remarks on the poet, not sketching the life and character of the man; but I may be allowed to call the attention of readers to this wonderful life and character. Blake was always poor in world's wealth, always rich in spiritual wealth, happy and contented and assured, living with God. As to his soul's salvation, I do not believe that he ever gave it a thought; any more than a child thinks of the question whether its loving parents will continue to feed and clothe and cherish it. He had none of the feverish raptures and hypochondriac remorses which even in the best of those who are commonly called saints excite a certain contemptuous pity in the midst of our love and admiration : he was a thoroughly healthy and happy religious soul, whose happiness was thoroughly unselfish and noble. As to the "Christian Evidences," as they are termed, of which the mass of good people are so enamoured, in trying to argue themselves and others into a sort of belief in a sort (and such a sort !) of deity; he would have no more dreamed of appealing to them than he would have

Introduction, The Lamb, The Chimney Sweeper, the Laughing Song, A Cradle Song, Holy Thursday, Infant Joy, The Divine Image; what holy and tender, and beautiful babe-lullabyes, babe joy-songs, are these! The ideal Virgin Mother might have sung them to her infant; lambs, and doves, and flowers might comprehend

tried elaborately to argue himself into belief in the existence of the sun. "I feel the warmth, I see the light and see by the light: what do you want to argue about? You may call it sun, moon, comet, star, or Will-o'-the-wisp, if so it pleases you; all I know and care for is this, that day by day it warms and lights me." Such would have been the sum of his reply to any questioner; for he was emphatically a seer, and had the disdain of all seers for the pretentions of the gropers and guessers who are blind. Like Swedenborg, he always relates things heard and seen; more purely a mystic than Swedenborg, he does not condescend to Idialectics and scholastic divinity. Those who fancy that a dozen stony syllogisms seal up the perennial fountain of our deepest questionings, will affirm that Blake's belief was an illusion. But an illusion constant and self-consistent and harmonious with the world throughout the whole of man's life, wherein does this differ from a reality? Metaphysically we are absolutely unable to prove any existence: we believe that those things really exist which we find pretty constant and consistent in their relations to us,—a very sound practical but very unsound philosophical belief. Blake and Swedenborg and other true mystics (Jesus among them) undoubtedly had senses other than ours; it is as futile for us to argue against the reality of their perceptions as it would be false in us to pretend that our perceptions are the same. As, however, Blake was supremely a mystic, it is but fair to add that he (and the same may be affirmed of Jesus) was unlike common Christians as thoroughly as he was unlike common Atheists; he lived in a sphere far removed from both. In the clash of the creeds, it is always a comfort to remember that sects with their sectaries, orthodox and heterodox, could not intersect at all if they were not in the same plane. Blake's esteem for argumentation may be read in one couplet :

If the sun and moon should doubt,
They'd immediately go out.

I