I heard an Angel singing
When the day was springing:
"Mercy, Pity, Peace

Is the world's release."

Thus he sang all day
Over the new mown hay,
Till the sun went down,
And haycocks lookèd brown.

I heard a Devil curse

Over the heath & the furze :
"Mercy could be no more
If there was nobody poor,

"And pity no more could be,
If all were as happy as we.'
At his curse the sun went down
And the heavens gave a frown.

Experience sets up in the Garden of Love the priest's chapel with "Thou shalt not" written over the door; experience teaches us to doubt the reality of our visions, to substitute reason for intuition, to mistrust the spontaneity of our emotions, to surrender our primitive impulses to the dictates of religion; experience is the fall of man, the sin of the world, above all the curse of the age in which Blake himself was to live and suffer and sing. The mission of his art, therefore, as of his theosophy, was to return to a condition of childlike innocence. There is no thought of retracing laboriously the path of experience; there is no image in his poems like

the picture of the haggard old man in The City of Dreadful Night, crawling

From this accursed night without a morn,

And through the deserts which have else no track, And through vast wastes of horror-haunted time, To Eden innocence in Eden's clime.

Rather his philosophy hints of revolutions of birth and rebirth, of experience returning naturally into the innocence from which it sprung. Occasionally in conversation he spoke of transmigration as a life-history of which in his own case he was fully conscious; but more commonly, as in The Mental Traveller it is not so much a question of reincarnation as of mystical regeneration. "Whenever any individual rejects error and embraces truth," he says, "a Last Judgment passes upon that individual"; the evil of experience is wiped away, and the man becomes now and here as a child to whom the windows of heaven are opened.

It is the peculiar merit of his verse that it really gives the impression of childlikeness and a kind of dewy freshness. One feels this in a thousand places-in such lines as those to an infant, which Swinburne regards as the loveliest he ever wrote:

Sleep, sleep: in thy sleep

Little sorrows sit and weep;

and in such stanzas as these in which the poet's

song and the wild flower's song blend together to

make a single melody:

As I wander'd the forest,
The green leaves among,
I heard a wild flower
Singing a song.

"I slept in the Earth
In the silent night,

I murmur'd my fears
And I felt delight.

"In the morning I went,

As rosy as morn,

To seek for new Joy;

But I met with scorn.' ""

If one wishes to see the difference between this identification of the poet with the naïve emotions of childhood and the contemplation of these emotions through experience, let him compare these lines with Goethe's "Ich ging im Walde." Again, I do not mean that Blake is for this reason the higher poet; I mean merely to distinguish. The true commentary on Blake is to read him side by side with Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality, where the beauty of childhood is seen frankly through the medium of memory, and there is no attempt to deny or escape the burden of experience. The result of Blake's method is in one sense curiously paradoxical. He was himself the sincerest of poets; his faculty of immediate contact is perfectly genuine, and yet the mood

induced in most readers is one perilously akin to affectation. We feel the aërial transparency and the frail loveliness of his inspiration, and for a moment and by a kind of ritualistic self-purgation we may identify ourselves with his mood-but only for awhile and at rare intervals. For the most part a little investigation will detect a slight note of insincerity in our enjoyment, and, having discovered this, we fall back on the poets who accept fully the experience of the human heart. We find something closer to our understanding, something for that reason wholesomer, in men like Wordsworth and Goethe-perhaps even in the more formal poets of Blake's own age. For after all it is not the office of the true poet to baffle the longing heart with charms of self-deception, and we are men in a world of men. The unmitigated admiration and the effective influence of Blake are to be found not among the greater romantic writers of the early nineteenth century, but among the lesser men-Rossetti, Swinburne, and their school-who in one way or another have shrunk from the higher as well as the lower realities of life.

THE THEME OF "PARADISE LOST"

It was not so very long ago that a professor of English in a great university had the audacity to declare in print that "no one nowadays would read Paradise Lost for pleasure!" The statement is a generalisation from the gentleman's own delinquencies mayhap, but it does unfortunately approach too near the actual truth to be comfortable. And partly, I think, Milton suffers this neglect because the true theme of his poem is not commonly understood, and the ordinary reader from false tradition allows his mind to seek out and dwell on what are not properly its characteristic beauties. For, apart from style and execution (in which no one would deny supreme excellence to Milton, so that these may be eliminated from the question), the underlying motive of a work has much to do with its abiding hold on our interest; and so true is this that a false opinion in regard to its motive may deprive a poem of the popularity rightly its due.

Now in order to the possession of this enduring vitality two distinct elements must enter into the constitution of an epic: it must be built upon a theme deeply rooted in national belief, and, further, the development of this theme must express, more or less symbolically, some universal