Page:The Poems of William Blake (Shepherd, 1887).djvu/15

 Rh his shorter pieces unequalled except in Shakespeare and Tennyson, and evidently due to a reverential study of the earlier models. Our two greatest Poets have never written songs of more surpassing melody or richer music than the Blossom and the Sunflower.

Those other wonderful productions of Blake's mystical and visionary genius—the Books of Prophecy—of which the key-note is struck in the two opening pieces of the Songs of Experience, have yet to find acceptance with the public. Despite their strangeness of metre, however, and a certain forbidding aspect, at first sight, of wildness and incoherence, they will well repay study, and will be found to contain here and there lines of as great beauty as anything in his lyrical poems. Before closing our remarks, we must say a final word respecting the principle adopted by Mr. Rossetti in his reprint of some of these poems in the second volume of Gilchrist's "Life of Blake." Once for all, while rendering due homage to his genius and rare critical perception, as well as to the great services he has rendered to the fame of Blake, we must firmly protest against the dangerous precedent he has established of tampering with his author's text. Much ruggedness of metre and crudeness of expression he has doubtless removed