Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/107

 more sombre colours, profounder meanings, ruder eloquence, characterise the Songs of Experience of five years later.

In 1789, the year in which Blake's hand engraved the Songs of Innocence, Wordsworth was finishing his versified Evening Walk on the Goldsmith model; Crabbe ('Pope in worsted stockings,' as Hazlitt christened him), famous six years before by his Village, was publishing one of his minor quartos, The Newspaper; and Mrs. Charlotte Smith, not undeservedly popular, was accorded a fifth edition within five years, of her Elegiac Sonnets, one or two of which still merit the praise of being good sonnets, among the best in a bad time. In these years, Hayley, Mason, Hannah More, Jago, Downman, Helen Maria Williams, were among the active producers of poetry; Cumberland, Holcroft, Inchbald, Burgoyne, of the acting drama of the day; Peter Pindar, and Pasquin Williams, of the satire.

The designs, simultaneous offspring with the poems, which in the most literal sense illuminate the Songs of Innocence, consist of poetized domestic scenes. The drawing and draperies are grand in style as graceful, though covering few inches' space; the colour pure, delicate, yet in effect rich and full. The mere tinting of the text and of the free ornamental border often makes a refined picture. The costumes of the period are idealized, the landscape given in pastoral and symbolic hints. Sometimes these drawings almost suffer from being looked at as a book and held close, instead of at due distance as pictures, where they become more effective. In composition, colour, pervading feeling, they are lyrical to the eye, as the Songs to the ear.

On the whole, the designs to the Songs of Innocence are finer as well as more pertinent to the poems; more closely interwoven with them, than those which accompany the Songs of Experience. Of these in their place.