Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/159

 Of the prevailing difference of sentiment between these poems and the Songs of Innocence, may be singled out as examples The Clod and the Pebble, and even so slight a piece as The Fly; and in a more sombre mood, The Garden of Love, The Little Boy Lost, Holy Thursday (antitype to the poem of the same title in Songs of Innocence), The Angel, The Human Abstract, The Poison Tree, and above all, London. One poem, The Little Girl Lost, may startle the literal reader, but has an inverse moral truth and beauty of its own. Another, The Little Girl Lost, and Little Girl Found, is a daringly emblematic anticipation of some future age of gold, and has the picturesqueness of Spenserian allegory, lit with the more ethereal spiritualism of Blake. Touched by

is this story of the carrying off of the sleeping little maid by friendly beasts of prey, who gambol round her as she lies; the kingly lion bowing 'his mane of gold,' and on her neck dropping 'from his eyes of flame, ruby tears;' who, when her parents seek the child, brings them to his cave; and

Well might Flaxman exclaim, 'Sir, his poems are as grand as his pictures,' Wordsworth read them with delight, and used the words before quoted. Blake himself thought his poems finer than his designs. Hard to say which are the more uncommon in kind. Neither, as I must reiterate, reached his own generation. In Malkin's Memoirs of a Child, specimens from the Poetical Sketches and Songs of Innocence and Experience were given; for these poems struck the well-meaning scholar, into whose hands by chance they fell, as somewhat astonishing; as indeed they struck most who