Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/323

Rh ever is, his expanding affections embraced universal man, and, without violating, beautified and hallowed even his individual peculiarities. Accordingly, many of these delicious lays belong to the Era as well as to the Author. They are remarkable for the transparent depth of thought which constitutes true simplicity—they give us glimpses of all that is holiest in the childhood of the world and the individual—they abound with the sweetest touches of that pastoral life, by which the Golden Age may be still visibly represented to the Iron one—they delineate full-orbed age, ripe with the seeds of a second infancy, which is 'the Kingdom of Heaven.' The latter half of the volume, comprising the 'Songs of Experience,' consists, it is true, of darker themes; but they, too, are well and wonderfully sung, and ought to be preserved, because, in contrastive connection with the 'Songs of Innocence,' they do convey a powerful impression of '.

But what of the later illustrated works, the colossal or monstrous chaotic "Prophetic Books," which yet contain germs of such noble grandeur and beauty that so fervid a lover and consummate a master of pure classical form as Mr. Swinburne dedicates a large portion of a volume to their exposition? Dr. Wilkinson says that Blake "naturalised the spiritual, instead of spiritualising the natural;" that he preferred "seeing truth under the loose garments of typical or even mythologic representation, rather than in the Divine-Human Embodiment of Christianity;" and continues in a very powerful, though in my judgment too vehement, passage, which I must cite at full length, the slender book being so little known and so scarce:—

"And, accordingly, his Imagination, self-divorced from a Reason which might have elevated and chastened it, and necessarily spurning the scientific daylight and material realism of