Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/267

 THE POEMS OF WILLIAM BLAKE 25I the wealth and spiritual subsistence of generations yet unborn. When Blake wrote this, however young in years, he was undoubtedly mature ; as Keats when he wrote "Hyperion," as Shelley when he wrote "Adonais," or " The Triumph of Life." We shall all soon know it by heart, and cherish it in our hearts, with the speeches of Henry at Agincourt and the " Scots wha hae " of Burns, with Campbell's " Mariners of Eng- land," and Robert Browning's " Home Thoughts from the Sea;" and then we shall feel and know that for us it is perfect beyond criticism, except the criticism of reverend interpretation. It is Titanic, and it cleaves to its mother earth like a Titan, like a mountain, like a broad oak-tree; and the grandeur of its strength is the grandeur of a gnarled oak whose vigorous life bursts through all conventional symmetries, the grandeur of a mountain which the central fires have heaved into lines enormous and savagely irregular. Many years afterwards, in 1789, when Blake was thirty-two, the " Songs of Innocence " appeared ; and we learn from them the strange fact that he who was mature in his childhood and youth became in his manhood a little child. A little child, pure in soul as the serenest light of the morning, happy and innocent as a lamb leaping in the meadows, singing all its joy in the sweetest voice with that exquisite infantine lisp which thrills the adult heart with yearning tenderness.* The "Introduction," "The auditors of the breath decide whether he succeeds or no. There is indeed in adult breath such a peopling of multitudinous
 * "Let the reader try to breathe like a child, and let the