Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/142

88 The ballad of William Bond has great spiritual beauties, whatever its meaning; and it is one of only two examples, in this form, occurring among Blake's lyrics. The other is called Long John Brown and Little Mary Bell, and perhaps the reader may be sufficiently surprised without it.

The shorter poems, and even the fragments, afford many instances of that exquisite metrical gift and rightness in point of form which constitute Blake's special glory among his contemporaries, even more eminently perhaps than the grander command of mental resources which is also his. Such qualities of pure perfection in writing verse, as he perpetually, without effort, displayed, are to be met with among those elder poets whom he loved, and such again are now looked upon as the peculiar trophies of a school which has arisen since his time; but he alone (let it be repeated and remembered) possessed them then, and possessed them in clear completeness. Colour and metre, these are the true patents of nobility in painting and poetry, taking precedence of all intellectual claims; and it is by virtue of these, first of all, that Blake holds, in both arts, a rank which cannot be taken from him.

Of the Epigrams on Art, which conclude this section, a few are really pointed, others amusingly irascible,—all more or less a sort of nonsense verses, and not even pretending to be much else. To enter into their reckless spirit of doggrel, it is almost necessary to see the original note-book in which they occur, which continually testifies, by sudden exclamatory entries, to the curious degree of boyish impulse which was one of Blake's characteristics. It is not improbable that such names as Rembrandt, Reubens, Correggio, Reynolds, may have met the reader's eye before in a very different sort of context from that which surrounds them in the surprising poetry of this their brother artist; and certainly they are made to do service here as scarecrows to the crops of a rather jealous husbandman. And for all that, I have my strong suspicions that the same amount of disparagement of them uttered to instead of by our good Blake, would have elicited, on his side, a somewhat different estimate. These phials of his wrath, however, have no poison but merely some laughing gas in them so now that we are setting the laboratory a little in order, let these, too, come down from their dusty upper shelf.