Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/141

Rh creature, half sentient and half conscious, has a world of its own akin in somewise to the country of its birth.

The Mental Traveller seemed at first a hopeless riddle; and the editor of these Selections must confess to having been on the point of omitting it, in spite of its high poetic beauty, as incomprehensible. He is again indebted to his brother for the clear-sighted, and no doubt correct, exposition which is now printed with it, and brings its full value to light.

The poem of Mary appears to be, on one side, an allegory of the poetic or spiritual mind moving unrecognised and reviled among its fellows; and this view of it is corroborated when we find Blake applying to himself two lines almost identically taken from it, in the last of the Letters to Mr. Butts printed in the Life. But the literal meaning may be accepted, too, as a hardly extreme expression of the rancour and envy so constantly attending pre-eminent beauty in women.

A most noble, though surpassingly quaint example of Blake's loving sympathy with all forms of created life, as well as of the kind of oracular power which he possessed of giving vigorous expression to abstract or social truths, will be found in the Auguries of Innocence. It is a somewhat tangled skein of thought, but stored throughout with the riches of simple wisdom.

Quaintness reaches its climax in William Bond, which may be regarded as a kind of glorified street-ballad. One point that requires to be noted is that the term 'fairies' is evidently used to indicate passionate emotions, while 'angels' are spirits of cold coercion. The close of the ballad is very beautiful. It is not long since there seemed to dawn on the present writer a meaning in this ballad not discovered before. Should we not connect it with the line In a Myrtle Shade (page 118), the meaning of which is obvious to all knowers of Blake as bearing on marriage? And may not 'William Bond' thus be William Blake, the bondman of the 'lovely myrtle tree'? It is known that the shadow of jealousy, far from unfounded, fell on poor Catherine Blake's married life at one moment, and it has been stated that this jealousy culminated in a terrible and difficult crisis. We ourselves can well imagine that this ballad is but a literal relation, with such emotional actors, of some transfiguring trance and passion of mutual tears from which Blake arose no longer 'bond' to his myrtle-tree, but with that love, purged of all drossier element, whose last death-bed accent was, "Kate, you have ever been an angel to me!"