How great thy use, how great thy blessing. Every thing that lives, Lives not alone nor for itself. Fear not, and I will call

The weak worm from its lowly bed, and thou shalt hear its voice. Come forth, worm of the silent valley, to thy pensive queen."

The helpless worm arose, and sat upon the Lily's leaf,

And the bright cloud sailed on to find his partner in the vale.

III.

Then Thel, astonished, viewed the worm upon its dewy bed.

"Art thou a worm? image of weakness, art thou but a worm? I see thee, like an infant, wrapped in the Lily's leaf:

Ah! weep not, little voice, thou canst not speak, but thou canst weep.

Is this a worm? I see thee lie helpless and naked, weeping, And none to answer, none to cherish thee with mother's smiles."

The clod of clay heard the worm's voice, and rais'd her pitying head:

She bow'd over the weeping infant, and her life exhal'd

In milky fondness: then on Thel she fix'd her humble eyes.

O beauty of the vales of Har! we live not for ourselves. Thou seest me, the meanest thing, and so I am indeed; My bosom of itself is cold and of itself is dark, But He that loves the lowly pours His oil upon my head, And kisses me, and binds His nuptial bands around my breast, And says: Thou mother of my children, I have loved thee, And I have given thee a crown that none can take away.' But how this is, sweet maid, I know not, and I cannot know; I ponder, and I cannot ponder: yet I live and love!"

The daughter of beauty wip'd her pitying tears with her white veil,
And said:" Alas! I knew not this, and therefore did I weep.
That God would love a worm, I knew, and punish the evil foot
That wilful bruised its helpless form; but that He cherish'd it
With milk and oil, I never knew, and therefore did I weep.
And I complained in the mild air, because I fade away,
And lay me down in thy cold bed, and leave my shining lot."

Queen of the vales," the matron clay answered; "I heard thy sighs,

And all thy moans flew o'er my roof, but I have call'd them

down.

Wilt thou, O queen, enter my house? 'tis given thee to enter, And to return: fear nothing, enter with thy virgin feet."

IV.

The eternal gates' terrrific porter lifted the northern bar;
Thel enter'd in and saw the secrets of the land unknown.
She saw the couches of the dead, and where the fibrous root
Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists:
A land of sorrows and of tears, where never smile was seen.

She wander'd in the land of clouds, through valleys dark, listening
Dolours and lamentations; wailing oft beside a dewy grave
She stood in silence, listening to the voices of the ground,
Till to her own grave-plot she came, and there she sat down,
And heard this voice of sorrow breathed from the hollow pit.

"Why cannot the ear be closed to its own destruction?
Or the glistening eye to the poison of a smile?
Why are eyelids stor'd with arrows ready drawn,

Where a thousand fighting-men in ambush lie,

Or an eye of gifts and graces showering fruits and coined gold?

"Why a tongue impress'd with honey from every wind?
Why an ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in?
Why a nostril wide inhaling terror, trembling and affright?
Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy?
Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?"

The virgin started from her seat, and with a shriek
Fled back unhinder'd till she came into the vales of Har.

POEMS HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.

[The contents of the precious section which now follows have been derived partly from the MS. Note-book to which frequent reference has been made in the Life, and partly from another small autograph collection of different matter, somewhat more fairly copied. The poems have been reclaimed, as regards the first-mentioned source, from as chaotic a mass as could well be imagined; amid which it has sometimes been necessary either to omit, transpose, or combine, so as to render available what was very seldom found in a final state. And even in the pieces drawn from the second source specified above, means of the same kind have occasionally been resorted to, where they seemed to lessen obscurity or avoid redundance. But with all this, there is nothing throughout that is not faithfully Blake's own.

One piece in this series (The Two Songs) may be regarded as a different version of The Human Abstract, occurring in the Songs of Experience. This new form is certainly the finer one, I think, by reason of its personified character, which adds greatly to the force of the impression produced. It is, indeed, one of the finest things Blake ever did, really belonging, by its vivid completeness, to the order of perfect short poems,-never a very large band, even when the best poets are ransacked to recruit it. Others among the longer poems of this section, which are, each in its own way, truly admirable, are Broken Love, Mary, and Auguries of Innocence.

Never perhaps have the agony and perversity of sundered affection been more powerfully (however singularly) expressed than in the piece called Broken Love. The speaker is one whose soul has been intensified by pain to be his only world, among the scenes, figures, and events of which he moves as in a new state of being. The emotions have been quickened and isolated by conflicting torment, till each is a separate companion. There is his 'spectre,' the jealous pride which scents in the snow the footsteps of the beloved rejected woman, but is a wild beast to guard his way from reaching her; his emanation' which silently weeps within him, for has not he also sinned? So they wander together in 'a fathomless and boundless deep,' the morn full of tempests and the night of tears. Let her weep, he says, not for his sins only, but for her own; nay, he will cast his sins upon her shoulders too; they shall be more and more till she come to him again. Also this woe of his can array itself in stately imagery. He can count separately how many of his soul's affections the knife she stabbed it with has slain, how many yet mourn over the tombs which he has built for these: he can tell, too, of some that still watch around his bed, bright sometimes with ecstatic passion of melancholy, and crowning his mournful head with vine. All these living forgive her transgressions: when will she look upon them, that the dead may live again? Has she not pity to give for pardon? nay, does he not need her pardon too? He cannot seek her, but oh! if she would return! Surely her place is ready for her, and bread and wine of forgiveness of sins.

I have dwelt on the meaning of this poem, because it is one which, from the figurative form given to it, might be accounted specially obscure. But in reality, it is perhaps the only instance in which Blake has dealt with any of the deeper phases of human passion; and though the way of dealing with it is all his own, the result is as startlingly true as

it is grand and impressive, and gives rise to regret that this poet did not oftener elect to walk in the ways, not of spirits or children, but of living men.

The Crystal Cabinet and the Mental Traveller belong to a more truly mystical order of poetry. The former is a lovely piece of lyrical writing, but certainly has not the clearness of crystal. Yet the meaning of such among Blake's compositions as this is, may sometimes be missed chiefly through seeking for a sense more recondite than was really meant. This enigmatic-looking poem probably does no more than symbolize in a new way the world-old phenomena of a lover's transfiguration of his mistress and of all things through her, and the reaction when the dream is broken by a too ardent effort to embody it. The most absolutely puzzling stanza is the last, where the disenchanted couple become a weeping woman and babe; perhaps meant to express the greater natural maturity of the love-element in women.

The Mental Traveller seemed at first a hopeless riddle; and the editor of these selections must confess to having been on the point of omitting it, in spite of its high poetic beauty, as incomprehensible. He is indebted to his brother for the clear-sighted, and no doubt correct, exposition which is now printed with it, and brings its full value to light.

The poem of Mary appears to be, on one side, an allegory of the poetic or spiritual mind moving unrecognised and reviled among its fellows; and this view of it is corroborated when we find Blake applying to himself two lines almost identically taken from it, in the last of the Letters printed towards the close of this volume. But the literal meaning may be accepted, too, as a hardly extreme expression of the rancour and envy so constantly attending pre-eminent beauty in women.

A most noble, though surpassingly quaint example of Blake's loving sympathy with all forms of created life, as well as of the kind of oracular power which he possessed of giving vigorous expression to abstract or social truths, will be found in the Auguries of Innocence. It is a somewhat tangled skein of thought, but stored throughout with the riches of simple wisdom.

Quaintness reaches its climax in William Bond, which may be regarded as a kind of glorified street-ballad. One point that requires to be noted, if the reader would arrive at such moderate comprehension as seems possible here, is that the term 'fairies' is evidently used to indicate passionate emotions, while 'angels' are spirits of coldness and repulsion. The close of the ballad is very beautiful in its two last stanzas, but the upshot of the story is wonderfully hazy. It would appear most probably to imply a reconciliation, resulting from the hero's pity for the heroine, whom he has been trying to get rid of. If so, it must be admitted that Mr. Bond is no great prize, nor Miss Green a very enviable dramatic personage. I have inserted this ballad because it certainly has beauties as well as peculiarities, and also because it is one of only two such examples among Blake's poetry. The other is called Long John Brown and Little Mary Bell, and perhaps the reader may be sufficiently surprised without it.

The shorter poems, and even the fragments, afford many instances of that exquisite metrical gift and rightness in point of form which constitute Blake's special glory among his contemporaries, even more eminently perhaps than the grander command of mental resources which is also his. Such qualities of pure perfection in writing verse, as he perpetually without effort displayed, are to be met with among those elder poets whom hẹ loved, and such again are now looked upon as the peculiar trophies of a school which has arisen since his time; but he alone (let it be repeated and remembered) possessed them then, and possessed them in clear completeness. Colour and metre, these are the true patents of nobility in painting and poetry, taking precedence of all intellectual claims; and it is by virtue of these, first of all, that Blake holds in both arts a rank which cannot be taken from him.

Of the Epigrams on Art, which conclude this section, a few are really pointed, others

amusingly irascible,—all more or less a sort of nonsense verses, and not even pretending to be much else. To enter into their reckless spirit of doggrel, it is almost necessary to see the original note-book in which they occur, which continually testifies, by sudden exclamatory entries, to the curious degree of boyish impulse which was one of Blake's characteristics. It is not improbable that such names as Rembrandt, Rubens, Correggio, Reynolds, may have met the reader's eye before in a very different sort of context from that which surrounds them in the surprising poetry of this their brother artist; and certainly they are made to do service here as scarecrows to the crops of a rather jealous husbandman. And for all that, I have my strong suspicions that the same amount of disparagement of them uttered to instead of by our good Blake, would have elicited on his side a somewhat different estimate. These phials of his wrath, however, have no poison but merely some laughing gas in them; so now that we are setting the laboratory a little in order, let these too come down from their dusty upper shelf.]

THE BIRDS.

He. WHERE thou dwellest, in what grove,
Tell me, fair one, tell me, love,
Where thou thy charming nest dost build,
O thou pride of every field!

She. Yonder stands a lonely tree,

There I live and mourn for thee;
Morning drinks my silent tear,
And evening winds my sorrow bear.

He. O thou summer's harmony,

I have lived and mourned for thee;
Each day I mourn along the wood,
And night hath heard my sorrows loud.

She. Dost thou truly long for me?

And am I thus sweet to thee?

Sorrow now is at an end,
O my lover and my friend!

He. Come on wings of joy we'll fly

To where my bower is hung on high;
Come, and make thy calm retreat
Among green leaves and blossoms sweet.