astonishing; whether we regard the fact that they were written between Blake's twelfth and twentieth years, or reflect that they thus preceded even the first publications of Cowper and of Burns, not to speak of other and later authors in whose work the modern spirit and tone of poetry are more distinctly perceptible. Blake, in truth, when in his teens, was a wholly unique poet; far ahead of his contemporaries, and of his predecessors of three or four generations, equally in what he himself could do, and in his sympathy for olden sources of inspiration. In his frag. mentary drama of Edward the Third we recognize one who has loved and studied Shakspeare to good purpose: and several of the short lyrics in the Poetical Sketches have the same sort of pungent perfume-indefinable but not evanescent-that belongs to the choicest Elizabethan songs; the like play of emotion, or play of colour, as it might be termed; the like ripeness and roundness, poetic, and intolerant of translation into prose. At the time when Blake wrote these songs, and for a long while before, no one was doing anything of at all the same kind. Not but that, even in Blake, lines and words occur here and there betraying the fadeur of the eighteenth century.1

It cannot be said that he ever surpassed in absolute lyrical gift, nor yet indeed in literary finish, the most excellent things in his earliest volume. The Songs of Innocence, however, are,

'Take for instance the line (from a peculiarly lovely and very early poem in the Poetical Sketches),

"And Phoebus fired my vocal rage; or this from the couplets To Mrs. Butts (1800), "Receive this tribute from a harp sincere."

taken in their totality, fully up to the same mark; and they have the additional value conferred by unity of scheme, and relation of parts. Some of

the little poems included in this series are the most perfect expression ever given (so far as I know) to babe-life-to what a man can remember of himself as an infant, or can enter into as existing in other infants, or can love as of the essence of infancy. Blake was a believer (with more or less exactness of dogma) in the preëxistence of the human soul. These poems are very like the utterance of a babe, sentient at once of its present infantine and of its past matured existence; feeling the life and thinking the thoughts of infancy, yet feeling and thinking all this through the medium of a higher consciousness, a fullness of spiritual stature which once was, and again shall be. The comparative merit of the Songs of Innocence and the later-written Songs of Experience has been debated by competent critics, with diverse conclusions. To me it seems that the finest compositions in the Experience are fully as admirable as the finest in the Innocence; the unsuccessful items, however, being more numerous, and the faulty elements throughout producing a more damaging effect. The tone of thought, necessarily more varied, is also, in a sense, more elevated, but not so constantly well sustained or at unity with itself.

The Songs of Experience here and there, and also the Book of Thel (not to speak of examples even in the earlier poems) show us something of the obscure side of Blake's poetry; his arbitrary use of words and symbols, and a certain way he had of hurrying his conceptions into shape. Clearly,

no poet had conceptions more immediate: Blake, by an inchoate method of execution, where things are said with as much abruptness as vividness, and are indicated or approximated rather than exhibited, and so left to explain themselves or not as the case may turn out, succeeds in conveying to his reader a good deal of this same immediate impression felt by himself. It cannot be so sudden and striking to the reader as it was to the writer; but the very obscurity serves to make it rapid. The reader, while he feels that explanation is needed (and explanation can only be a lengthy process, and so far conflicts with the immediate. ness of impression) has a sense also of something hastily presented to him, and as hastily withdrawn. He snatches a meaning, or else must miss it; for, before he has time to think it out, another image has replaced the former one. In some of the re

maining poems the obscurity increases; and a certain proportion of them is really not intelligible, save by an effort of conjecture: I may cite The Crystal Cabinet, The Mental Traveller, and William Bond. The two former, however, with all their difficulty, are exceedingly fine; and some others of our volume, especially Broken Love and Auguries of Innocence, rank among Blake's noblest performances. The Everlasting Gospel, again, is in parts enough to baulk the interpreting faculty of the most ingenious, were it required to substitute a precise explanation for the furor of the poet, itself combined out of the passion of worship and the passion of contradiction. This extraordinary poem, and the great majority of those which follow it in our volume, were not published during Blake's life. The Everlasting Gospel, in

fact, had never till now been published anywhere in full; the others, with comparatively few exceptions, appeared for the first time in Mr. Gilchrist's book. Along with The Everlasting Gospel, some other brief compositions are now for the first time reproduced in a printed shape from the MS. book by Blake belonging to Mr. Dante G. Rossetti. These waifs and strays include a few of the Epigrams and Satirical Pieces on Art and Artists; some of which, as also of the Couplets and Fragments, are more grotesque than vivacious, and a few not far removed from pointless absurdity. Every now and then, however, Blake shows a real epigrammatic faculty: he hits a stinging and ringing stroke, the sound of which is easily remembered by whoever heard it, and the sensation of it assuredly never forgotten by the person to whom it was administered.

Of some of Blake's early poems, it has been observed by a very discerning critic,1—and the same remark might be applied to his poetical works generally" They have the grandeur of lofty simplicity, not of laboured pomp; a grandeur like that which invests our imaginations of the patriarchs. By a well, beneath a palm-tree, stands one who wears but a linen turban and a

The gentleman who, under the signature of "B. V." wrote some articles in the National Reformer in 1866, reviewing Mr. Gilchrist's book. This is the same writer who has produced in 1874, also in the National Reformer, an extremely remarkable poem, of philosophical meaning and symbolic or visionary form, named The City of Dreadful Night. It was preceded, three or four years ago, by another poem, fully as noticeable but practically unknown, entitled Weddah and Om el Bonain, an oriental story of passion and adverse fate.

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simple flowing robe, and who but watches browsing sheep, and camels drinking: yet no modern monarch, however gorgeously arrayed and brilliantly surrounded, can compare with him in majesty." And again: Every man living in seclusion, and developing an intense interior life, comes to give quite a peculiar significance to certain words and phrases and emblems. Metaphors which to the common bookwrights and journalists are mere handy counters, symbols almost as abstract and unrelated to the things they represent as are the x and y and z used in solving an algebraic problem, are, for him, burdened with rich and various freights of spiritual experience. They are ships in which he has sailed over uncharted seas to unmapped shores; with which he has struggled through wild tempests, and been tranced in divine calms; in which he has returned with treasures from all the zones: and he loves them as the sailor loves his ship. His writings may thus appear, to any one reading them for the first time, very obscure, and often very ludicrous: the strange reader sees a battered old hull, where the writer sees a marvellous circumnavigation."

The latter of these two extracts applies more particularly to the Prophetic Books, to which we must now devote some little attention. Among writers concerning Blake, the only one who has ever conned these works without being bewildered and stunned, and hounded into desperation and denunciation, is Mr. Swinburne: he has made a real study of the books, in the spirit at once of an admirer and an investigator-an enthusiastic admirer of what is great in Blake, and an undaunted