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and the extremities treated with care; but they never exhibit a trace of the artist's own style-a curious proof of self-mastery.

Meanwhile, however, the imagination within him was active. Honestly as he might accept the business by which he was to live, it was in the intervals when he could be himself that Blake found his real life. For some years he had worked in putting some of his thick coming fancies on paper in the form of verse, and painting others in water-colour. A striking design, representing Plague as one of the attendant horrors of war, engraved in the 'Life,' shows that by 1784 the main elements of his style were already formed, although we have seen other early specimens much less marked with his manner.

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The poetry came into print through the aid of Flaxman and of a kindly-natured couple named Mathews, who, about 1783, introduced Blake to a literary circle which met at their house. The volume is amongst the rarissima of collectors, vying in scarcity with some of the Elizabethan books of verse; nor does the resemblance stop here. For this singular genius, original in everything, had, from his youth, according to the testimony of Dr. Malkin, been a diligent reader of our early poetry. Shak

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speare's Poems and Sonnets, and Ben Jonson's Underwoods,' are specially noted; and although, by 1770, students of the Elizabethan literature were probably less unfrequent than Mr. Gilchrist supposes, yet it is very remarkable that these lyrical writers should have been selected for his models, with instinctive taste and insight, by an engraver's lad some thirty years before the date of the ballads in which Wordsworth and Coleridge first made their submission to antiquity. A copious selection from these, and from Blake's later poems, has been wisely added to the Life. We cannot, as we have already intimated, join with Mr. G. Rossetti in that bias of mind which treats imperfect suggestiveness with the honours due to finished art; but a little fanaticism may be readily pardoned to the editor, if not precisely the first admirer, of such exquisitely tender and original stanzas as occur amongst Blake's earlier poems. It is sad but instructive to watch their steady decline, not less in poetry than in meaning, as Blake endeavoured to express ideas which could only be mastered by that sane experience of life and of literature which lay so far distant from the circumstances of his career. But when, in youth, and yet unvitiated in his mental vision by the distorting fog of religious mysticism, he poured forth his fine instincts in 'strains of unpremeditated art,' he could write with a most unusual delicacy of touch and music of expression. His verses at fourteen may be fairly set beside any specimens of early promise we know of.

To the Muses.
Whether on Ida's shady brow,

Or in the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the sun that now
From ancient melody have ceased;
Whether in Heaven ye wander fair,

Or the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue regions of the air,

Where the melodious winds have birth ;
Whether on crystal rocks ye rove
Beneath the bosom of the sea,
Wandering in many a coral grove;
Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry;
How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoy'd in you!

The languid strings do scarcely move,

The sound is forced, the notes are few.

Blake's brief poetical career may be traced in Mr. Gilchrist's volumes, through the 'Songs of Innocence' (1789), the 'Songs.

of

of Experience' (1794), and some few pieces now first printed from his MS., to the mystical strains in which, amidst a torrent of high-sounding phrases and oracular annunciations, here and there a glimpse, not simply of meaning, but of profound spiritual insight, relieves for a moment, if it does not repay, the labour of perusal. Our criticism would seem exactly such as might fit the writings of insane genius. We think that no one who, ignorant of their author's life, opened Jerusalem' or 'Albion,' 'Los,' 'Ahania,' 'America,' and the rest, would assign them a different origin.

Clouds roll heavy upon the Alps round Rousseau and Voltaire,

And on the mountains of Lebanon round the deceas'd gods of Asia,
And on the deserts of Africa round the Fallen Angels.
The Guardian Prince of Albion burns in his nightly tent!

Or how, except as a contribution from St. Luke's, should the respectable public of 1804, to whom Hayley was a poet, and Wordsworth a heretical innovator, receive such an announcement as prefaced Blake's epic of 'Jerusalem'?

SHEEP.

To the Public.

GOATS.

After my three years' slumber on the banks of ocean, I again display my giant forms to the public, my former giants and fairies having received the highest reward possible.

Yet we are convinced no judgment would be more false than that which should set these down as the utterances of insanity. They are simply the singular forms taken by total inexperience in literature, combined with the wish to express in words what can only be expressed in drawings; the writer being also a man of fervent genius and entire disregard to everything but the expression of what he thinks the truth. Blake, says Mr. Samuel Palmer, himself a water-colour painter of no small poetical faculty and technical power, in an excellent letter of reminiscences, 'wanted that balance of the faculties which might have assisted him in matters extraneous to his profession. He saw everything through art; and, in matters beyond its range, exalted it from a witness into a judge.' One of his most favourite aphorisms, Art is Christianity, and Christianity is Art,' explains the modus operandi of Blake, when working at his own free will. It may be compared with that phrase, The Beautiful is the Good, and the Good the Beautiful,' which, like many similar word-juggles, has fascinated more than one gifted man. Such a nature is led, by an impulse he cannot resist, into grappling with those problems which wider mental cultivation and experience of life would warn him should be touched with reserve and com

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manding ability, or not touched at all. The identity of the visible and invisible, or rather, the recognition of the ideal world as the true real (forcibly set forth in his Notes on a drawing of the Last Judgment,' vol. ii.), the mystery of evil, the real meaning of sin, these, and a few other like subjects of high import, haunted Blake with all the intensity of his imaginative nature. Here and there he says on them a few words of marvellous force and tenderness. It is possible that, had his whole training and career been different, he might have been the Coleridge of his time. But he was born an artist; and only by this standard is it fair or possible to judge him. Nothing can withstand the fury of my course among the stars of God, and in the abysses of the accuser.' 'I have composed an immense number of verses on one grand theme, similar to Homer's Iliad or Milton's Paradise Lost,' wrote the enthusiastic Blake to his friend Mr. Butts,—' an immense poem, which seems to be the labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study.' There are, certainly, few proofs of labour or study' in the instalment of the work hitherto published. But this was not his métier.

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Nos alio mentes, alio divisimus aures,
Jure igitur vincemur.

It is in the brief stanzas which Blake wrote before the evil spirit of mysticism and the chimera of regenerating England by a new Christianity of Art took possession of his mind, that we find his genuine claims to rank among our poets. Such are eminently The Lamb,' 'The little Black Boy,' 'The Blossom,' 'The Chimney-sweeper,' the 'Laughing' and 'Cradle' Songs, 'Infant Joy,' the first Nurse's Song,' and the Wild Flower.' Some of these little pieces, by their melody and a certain suppressed symbolism of meaning, remind us of Shelley. We quote two, regretting that we have not space for a fuller analysis:—

Nurse's Song.

When the voices of children are heard on the green,

And laughing is heard on the hill,

My heart is at rest within my breast,

And everything else is still.

Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,

And the dews of night arise;

Come, come, leave off play, and let us away

Till the morning appears in the skies.

No, no, let us play, for it is yet day,
And we cannot go to sleep;

Besides, in the sky the little birds fly,

And the hills are all covered with sheep.

Well,

Well, well, go and play till the light fades away,
And then go home to bed:

The little ones leapt, and shouted, and laugh'd,
And all the hills echoèd.

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The 'Songs of Innocence,' Blake's first publication, are a specimen of that original and truly artist-like manner in which almost all his own independent works were produced. Each poem is surrounded by a beautiful arabesque, with figure-vignettes interspersed, which bear reference to the poem. The words, with the outline of the decoration, are engraved on metal, in a style so eminently simple and effective that it is wonderful it should not have been more often employed. The process may be described as a reversed etching, the lights being bitten out with acid, and the darks printed from the surface left, in the manner of a woodcut. The chiaroscuro of these outlines is admirable; anything less mechanical, or further from the neat work which delights the vulgar in all ranks, cannot be imagined.* They may be fairly compared, in these respects, with the famous

* Blake, much later in his life, engraved a few woodcuts, specimens of which are included in the Life.' Rude as these are in a technical way, they are perfect examples of imaginative power. Every touch tells. Albert Dürer's work, or Bewick's, is hardly more original; and, like all really high art, with their simplicity they leave an impression of strange mysteriousness-of something that one cannot exhaust. It is to be regretted that engraving of this quality should have been almost extinguished in England in favour of that tricky sparkle and mindless minuteness which too often predominate in the popular landscape-series. Many of the cuts in Dr. N. Macleod's periodical, Good Words,' are, however, honourable exceptions to the Book of Beauty' style just noticed. Blake, with a truth which his epigrams do not always touch, has marked with legitimate bitterness of sarcasm a trait in the English mind which is certainly not less salient now than in the age that neglected him :—

Give pensions to the learned pig,
Or the hare playing on a tabor;
Anglus can never see perfection
But in the journey man's labour.

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