Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/365

 A STRANGE BOOK 349 And she heard the breath of God As she heard by Eden's flood : ' Good and Evil are no more ; Sinai's trumpets, cease to roar ; To be good only, is to be A God, or else a Pharisee,' " &c. Well might he say to the ordinary Christian in this same poem : — " Both read the Bible day and night, But thou read'st black where I read while." Dr. Wilkinson, more's the pity, with all his genial genius has followed his implacable master into his loathsome and horrible hells. Such pieces as "Atheism" ("Shelley's tear"), "Turner: Painter. His State," " Edgar Allan Poe," " Immanuel Kant," " Chatterton," if inspired at all were surely inspired by some obscene and insane imp of the Pit, not by "the Spirit;" the "wildness and fierce vagary" charged against Blake are here, only the vagary is cold-blooded even in its fierceness; and too appo- sitely we may continue the quotation : " This power is possessed in different degrees by every human being, if he will but give loose and free vent to the hell that is in him ; and hence, the madness even of the meanest, is terrific." How much more terrific the madness of one of the noblest, in subjection to infernal inspiration ! As for Dr. Wilkinson's heaven, as revealed in these poems, it is certainly more human or less inhuman than Swedenborg's ; but the humanity to my sense is rather childish. In fact, and I grieve to say so, it sometimes seems very like