Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/332

316 sweeter air, and readier to expound or expose its message, than this of the prophetic books. Nor is there among these any poem or passage of equal length so faultless and so noble as his 'Voice out of the Sea,' or his dirge over President Lincoln—the most sweet and sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the church of the world. But in breadth of outline and charm of colour these poems recall the work of Blake; and to neither poet can a higher tribute of honest praise be paid than this."

The foregoing extracts, which I certainly should not have made at such length had the books from which they are taken been more generally known or more easily accessible, exhibit one of those complicated disagreements among the doctors over which laymen are wont to chuckle, as feeling the burden of their ignorance very much lightened thereby. In this case, the doctors are the poets and mystics; the laymen, we common prosy readers. Rossetti discovers affinity, verging on identity, of Blake and Wilkinson; Wilkinson repudiates his twin-brother Blake, whom he pairs off with atheistic-pantheistic Shelley; Blake expresses the utmost contempt for Swedenborg, whom his unfraternal twin-brother idolises; Gilchrist pronounces Blake likest of all modern men to the Swedenborg he disdains; Swinburne can almost believe in transmigration of soul from Blake to Walt Whitman, the two are so wonderfully alike. As for Blake and Shelley, although Shelley's thirty years began with the latter half of Blake's seventy, I remember nothing in their memoirs or works to show that either knew aught of the other. It is not for poor me to decide when the doctors