Page:Life of William Blake, Pictor ignotus (Volume 1).djvu/58

ÆT. 11—20.] Sixteen years later (1793), came the poems Wordsworth afterwards named Juvenile, written between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two: The Evening Walk, and the Descriptive Sketches, with their modest pellucid merit, still in the fettered 18th century manner. Not till twenty-one years later (1798), followed the more memorable Lyrical Ballads, including for one thing, the Tintern Abbey of Wordsworth; for another, The Ancient Mariner of Coleridge

All these Poems had their influence, prompt or tardy, widening eventually into the universal. All were at any rate published. Some,—those of Burns,—appealed to the feelings of the people, and of all classes; those of Cowper to the most numerous and influential section of an English community. The unusual notes struck by William Blake, in any case appealing but to one class and a small one, were fated to remain unheard, even by the Student of Poetry, until the process of regeneration had run its course, and, we may say, the Poetic Revival gone to seed again: seeing that the virtues of simplicity and directness the new poets began by bringing once more into the foreground, are those least practised now.