Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/328

312 delightful collection of lyrical poems, 'NightingvaleNightingale [sic] Valley (1860), in which (at last) occur a specimen or two of Blake's verse. The coincidence is not a trivial one. Of all modern men, the engraver's apprentice [Blake] was to grow up the likest to Emanuel Swedenborg; already by constitutional endowment and temperament was so; in faculty for theosophic dreaming, for the seeing of visions while broad awake, and in matter-of-fact hold of spiritual things. To savan and to artist alike, while yet on earth, the heavens were opened. By Swedenborg's theological writings, the first English editions of which appeared during Blake's manhood, the latter was considerably influenced, but in no slavish spirit. These writings, in common with those of Jacob Boehmen, and of the other select mystics of the world, had natural affinities to Blake's mind, and were eagerly assimilated. But he hardly became a proselyte or 'Swedenborgian' proper [hardly!), though his friend Flaxman did."

Now let us see what Blake writes of Swedenborg, to whom he was "the likest of all modern men." When thirty-three he brought forth an engraved volume, illustrated in colour, of which Mr. Swinburne thus speaks ("William Blake: A Critical Essay," 1868, p. 204):—

"In 1790 Blake produced the greatest of all his books, a work indeed which we rank as about the greatest produced by the eighteenth century in the line of high poetry and spiritual speculation. The 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell' gives us the high-water mark of his intellect. None of his lyrical writings show the same sustained strength and radiance of mind; none of his other works in verse or prose give more than a hint here and a trace there of the same harmonious and humorous power, of the same choice of eloquent words, the same noble command and liberal music of thought; small things he could do perfectly, and great things often imperfectly; here for once he has written a book as perfect as his most faultless song, as great as his most imperfect rhapsody. His fire of spirit fills it from end to end, but never deforms the body, never singes the surface of the work, as too often in the still noble books of his later life The