Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/262

 246 CRITICAL STUDIES As Tom o' Bedlams did not wander the country when Blake wrote, the elements of vagabondage and mountebankism are not in his piece; but as an expression of lunacy — the government of reason overthrown, and wild imagination making the anarchy more anarchic by its reign of terror — it is thoroughly of the old Elizabethan strain. Here is a stanza which Edgar might have sung in the storm by the hovel on the heath : — "Like a fiend in a cloud, With howling woe After night I do crowd, And with night will go ; I turn my back to the East Whence comforts have increased ; For light doth seize my brain With frantic pain," Mark the appalling power of the verb crowd, reveal- ing, as by a lightning-flash, the ruins of sane person- ality, haunted and multitudinous, literally beside itself. Not one poet in twenty would have dared to use the word thus, and yet (although a careless reader might think it brought in merely for the sake of the rhyme) it was the very word to use. The address " To the Muses," sweet, calm, and masterly, as if the matured utterance of a conviction well pondered and of no recent date, yet written by a mere boy, embodies the essence of all that Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, many years afterwards, taught and sang in vindication of Pre-Drydenism. The poems in blank verse " To the Evening Star," "To Spring," and "To Summer," are perhaps even more wonderful than those in rhyme, considering the