Blake:

"The characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims' are the characters which compose all ages and nations. As one age falls, another rises, different to mortal sight, but to immortals only the same; for we see the same characters repeated again and again, in animals, vegetables, minerals, and in men. Nothing new occurs in identical existence. Accident ever varies. Substance can never suffer change, or decay. Of Chaucer's characters, as described in his Canterbury Tales,' some of the names or titles are altered by time, but the characters themselves forever remain unaltered; and consequently they are the physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter. I have known multitudes of those who would have been monks in the age of monkery, who in this deistical age are deists. As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linnæus numbered the planets, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men. The painter has consequently varied the heads and forms of his personages into all Nature's varieties; the horses he has also varied to accord to their riders; the costume is correct according to authentic monuments."

He then proceeds with a running commentary upon the separate characters, answering to what he has undertaken to say with lines in his engravings. Something of the same vagary will be discovered in both, but both justify Lamb's opinion of the catalogue, that it was the finest criticism of Chaucer's poem he had ever read."

The "Canterbury Pilgrims" was published by Blake in a rivalry with Stothard's print, and at this distance of time the commercial aspects of the competition have a humorous touch. Blake's indebtedness to the ordinary publishing facilities was not great, as we have seen; his own willfulness, his intractable talents, and, above all, his individual message of art and religion, isolated him from the common channels of communication with the public. So much the more did he place reliance upon his own methods. Any one can buy now, in various editions, Blake's "Poetical Sketches" and his "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience." These are included in Gilchrist's "Life," and they have been separately printed under the editorship of Mr. W. M. Rossetti and of Mr. R. H. Shepherd. They have passed into the common stock of literature, and some of the poems have long had a life in anthologies. The "Poetical Sketches was published in the ordinary manner in 1783; "Songs of Innocence" in 1789 and "Songs of Experience" in 1794, but these last two books were published in a very extraordinary manner by Blake himself, and happy is the occasional owner of the original copies.

To speak of "Songs of Innocence" first, it

engraved by him on copper, each page decorated, with an occasional separate design, making twenty-seven plates in all. In Gilchrist's "Life" this account is given of the process.

"The verse was written and the designs and marginal embellishments outlined on the copper with an impervious liquid, probably the ordinary stopping-out varnish of engravers. Then all the white parts or lights-the remainder of the plate, that is were eaten away with aquafortis, or other acid, so that the outline of letter and design was left prominent, as in stereotype. From these plates he printed off in any tint, yellow, brown, blue, required to be the prevailing or ground color in his facsimiles; red he used for the letter-press. The page was then colored by hand in imitation of the original drawing, with more or less variety of detail in the local hues. He ground and mixed his water-colors himself. The colors he used were few and simple; indigo, cobalt, gamboge, vermilion, Frankfort black freely, ultramarine rarely, chromes not at all. These he applied with a camel's-hair brush, not with a sable, which he disliked. He taught Mrs. Blake to take off the impressions with care and delicacy, which such plates signally needed, and also to help in tinting them from his drawings with right artistic feeling; in all which tasks she, to her honor, much delighted. The size of the plate was small, for the sake of economizing copper, something under five inches by three. They were done up in boards by Mrs. Blake's hand, forming a small octavo; so that the poet and his wife did everything in making the book, writing, designing, printing, engraving,everything excepting manufacturing the paper; the very ink, or color, rather, they did make. Never before, surely, was a man so literally the author of his own book."

It is significant of this discovery of Blake's, for so it may be called, that he received a revelation of it in a vision of the night. It is easy to translate into common language the supernatural experience of a man, under pressure day and night of one controlling purpose to make public his poems and designs, but it is still easier to take Blake's acceptance of the happy thought as a revelation, and count it as a harmonious part of the visionary's nature. For, mingled with the artistic power which we have been gradually illustrating, there was from the beginning a controlling and directing influence to which we find it hard to give a name. The story is a familiar one, that, when a child of eight or ten, as he sauntered through a field near London, he looked up and saw a tree filled with angels, "bright, angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars," and that looking upon some hay-makers at work, he saw angelic figures walking among them. A letter written by one of Blake's youthful disciples, just after his death, relates: "Just before he died his countenance

became fair, his eyes brightened, and he burst out singing of the things he saw in heaven." Between these two points of time lay a life of sixty years, which owned, with unfaltering faith, the positive presence and guidance of the spiritual world. Blake's letters, his conversations, his writings, his pictures, and his whole manner of life, bore unvarying testimony to the dominance in his nature of a spiritual existence which comprehended, penetrated and controlled this earthly life. It is difficult to present this subject briefly without falling into the pitfalls set by conventional statements of spiritual experience. Life would be too short to explain wherein Blake's spiritual belief differed from the vulgarities of so-called spiritualism, from the traditional belief of the church, from the contemporary doctrines of Swedenborg, or from the utterances of the great seers of the ages. The reader of the "Life" or the student of his art finds it more satisfactory to accept the fact of Blake's sincerity, and treat the results of his visionary observation in their individual appeal to the intellectual mind. Whence Blake's dreams came, opens an endless vista of speculation; what the forms were which were precipitated from the dreams, is of vastly more human interest. We may even concede an occult meaning in verse and picture capable of being discovered only by a kindred spirit, interpretative by its finer nature; there is nothing in such concession to prevent us from enjoying to the full such loveliness and strength as we do see.

Spiritual things are spiritually discerned, and what one finds in Blake will depend largely on the seeing eye which he brings. We have no intention of shielding Blake behind any mystic veil, drawing it aside only for the initiated; we simply say that genius always holds the possibility of a meaning, and perception always holds the possibility of blindness. However, the student of Blake's strangely diverse and comprehensive art may stand expectant and hopeful before the Songs of Innocence. Here one may enjoy, without the painful consciousness of a failure to attain the meaning; painful, we say, for perhaps the subtlest charm in this rainbow of poetic beauty is the elusiveness of the spell which it throws over us. There is no mockery in the grace, no tantalizing of the soul, but the gentlest of echoes to one's unspoken thought. In none of the poems is this more manifest than in the "Introduction," as it is called,

genius which is persistently given. He is constantly seeing and showing natural things as types, and finds no surer way of revealing spiritual realities than through elemental forms. Hence the recurrence of a few special figures, typical of youth, of age, of childhood, of motherhood; hence the lamb; hence the flaming fire. It would seem as if he were perpetually seeking to render the large visions which he has by familiar forms freed of their merely accidental limitations. It may truthfully be said that he saw his visions thus; that these common types were expanded for him into wondrous and luminous revelations of infinite truth and beauty; that when he saw and drew the lamb, that little creature, with its

"Softest clothing, woolly, bright "

its tender voice

"Making all the vales rejoice;"

was sometimes more than a conventional or even revered type of Divine tenderness.

"He is meek and He is mild,
He became a little child.

I a child and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name."

So he announces in his poem, and the entrance of the Divine love into the human

life is a present reality whenever Blake, recording his visions, draws the lamb with its bowed head or its affectionate caress.

The "Songs of Innocence" gives us Blake in the youthfulness of his visionary life. At that time, however pinched was his poverty, he was living in the light of a conscious power to wed beautiful visions to fitting words and lines. He had already had some training in poetry, as witness his "Poetical Sketches," from which one draws verses of singular merit; he had already mastered his graving tools, and served his apprenticeship to drawing masters; he was in the early years of his married life; he was at the height of physical youth. Doubtless all these influences conspired, and so he caught upon. his listening ear those accents of heavenly beauty which as yet admitted dark lines only for the heightening of the divine fair

ness.

Every one feels, whether or not he puts it into words, that the hymn-book picture of heaven as

"One sacred high eternal noon,"

is false and destructive of all the signs of God's creation; that the recurrence of

the weeping of the child Jesus in his cradle for all the human race, which is woven so

exquisitely into the angelic cradle-song; the contrast of age and childhood; the blending of poverty and pity of "Holy Thursday"; the light and shade in that solemn, majestic poem "Night"; the anxiety, too real to be grotesque, of the lost emmet; the passage of all pity into the Divine pity, and the final voice of the Ancient Bard, with its one warning note of the passage from youth into life-all these are supremely truthful notes in the "Songs of Innocence," by which the ethereal loveliness is saved from the monotony of an unreal and insipid sweetness. Of the decorative designs which accompany the songs we cannot speak with assurance gained by acquaintance with original copies, but to those who have seen similar work by Blake, as in the "Book of Thel," which appears in the Boston collection, the reproduction which we have in Gilchrist's "Life" gives a teasing conviction that we are blind men, hearing the songs but not seeing the images which they embody; that their beauty, wonderful as it is, would

phase of the soul. In most cases they are direct replies to the several "Songs of Innocence"; the "Tiger" offsets the "Lamb"; the "Little Girl Lost" the "Little Boy Found"; "Infant Sorrow" "Infant Joy"; and, sad and beautiful as many of the poems are, sometimes terrible in their revelation of evil, the book is incontestably weaker, and in the main, in a purely poetic sense, untruthful. Nor could there well be found a finer illustration of the supremacy of good than is exhibited by the contrast of these two books. Blake's sincerity is unquestionable, but the " Songs of Inno

mere lurid dreadfulness; it is when, near the close of that fiery poem the "Tiger," the poet asks:

"Did He who made the lamb make thee?"

Let any one read the poem and say if this line is not the salvation of it.

In these two books, with their blended text and design, Blake presented most perfectly that side of his genius which admits of universal apprehension. If he was, as he would claim, singing and drawing in obedience to heavenly visions, we are so intent upon what he gives us that we are not